Moms features stories about famous sports moms and their famous sports kids. We think Moms would make a great gift for any and all sports fans in your life — including people who are moms, who have moms, or who appreciate moms.

There’s an excerpt below.

Fang Fengdi did not allow her son to stoop. No matter how tall he got, no matter what looks people gave him, no matter how uncomfortable he felt walking down the street. “Straighten your back,” she would say. “Be proud of your height.” 

Fang was tall too—6’2. She had been the captain of the Chinese national women’s team, a center. Off the court, she was unassuming. Yao thought of his mom as somebody who was observant, always thinking one move ahead. On the court, she was fearless. One of Yao’s coaches who watched her play told him that his mother was “like a tiger.”  Her son was not like a tiger. In fact, Fang didn’t really think he had it in him. “You’re too soft,” she would tell him. Throw more elbows. 

Yao didn’t throw too many elbows. But he didn’t stoop, either. He kept growing and he kept playing ball. His father had been a basketball player too. “Basketball wasn’t something my parents played because they loved it,” Yao said. “They played because that’s what they were asked to do by the government.” But Yao did love it. He loved everything about it. 

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Fang was his best coach. She was there after games to tell him what he did right and what he did wrong. She was there when he moved to America, helping him buy a house and settle in Houston. She was worried about him at first. 

“I thought he’d fall apart in the face of such a physical game and all his bones would be crushed” 

But of course, she never would have let that happen. 

Thanks for reading Sports Stories.

In this sense, I don’t think there has ever been a more perfect Olympian than Wilma Rudolph. Everything about her story was mythological: the background, the setting in Rome, and of course the performance itself.

In the course of a decade, Wilma Rudolph went from wearing a leg brace due to childhood polio to sprinting into her place as one of the greatest of all time, and one of the earliest modern Olympic celebrities. The 1960 games in Rome were the first to be extensively televised in the United States. She swept through those games like a hurricane — a smiling, beloved hurricane. It’s easy to see why the world fell in love with her.

Our new zine tells the story of Wilma Rudolph’s mythological life. An Olympian if there ever was one.

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The founding myth of Rome is that a pair abandoned brothers named Remus and Romulus were adopted by a nice she-wolf, who suckled them and raised them. (Their father was Mars, the God of War, but he was not around.) They grew up to be strong and ambitious, and had the idea to start a city among the seven hills that defined the nearby landscape. However, they soon started to quarrel over where precisely that city should be located. Remus preferred the Aventine Hill and Romulus preferred the Palatine Hill.

They decided to settle it like gentlemen, which is to say through augury. They asked the Gods for a sign, which came in the form of vultures. Remus saw six of these enchanted vultures, then Romulus saw twelve. Remus believed that because he had spotted his vultures first, he had won the contest. Romulus believed that because had spotted *more* vultures, he in fact was the winner.

Romulus set about building a wall to surround the Palatine Hill, where his new city would be located. Remus, enraged, jumped over this wall to confront his brother. Romulus promptly killed him. And this is why the city is called Rome and not Reme.

The image of the two brothers suckling at the wolf became one of Rome’s great symbols. (Rome is a city full of great symbols.) It was also the official logo at the 1960 Olympics in which Wilma Rudolph competed. There’s some irony to this, because while Romulus and Remus may not have been abandoned, only to grow into rivals, Wilma’s family situation was the opposite. The love and care of her parents — and her many siblings — are what allowed her to recover from her childhood injuries, learn to walk, and become a champion.

So we put all this on a shirt, which in my opinion looks very cool.

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We’re excited to bring you physical objects made with great care — and we hope that you enjoy them, and remember to tell all your friends.

BASEBALL.RIP

But enough about physical objects. Adam and I are also doing some old fashioned blogging. A while back (years), we bought the domain name baseball.rip. It was sort of a joke we had about how people kept saying baseball was dying. Anyway, in honor of the ongoing lockout, we decided to actually use the thing. We’re posting hand drawn notes and drawings every day on our very official Sports Stories stationary. Dig it.

Thanks for reading Sports Stories.

One of the reasons the early UFC videos matched up with those ridiculous movies was because of the characters they had fighting in them. The competitors weren’t the well-trained, professional men and women you see out there today. They were oddballs and dirtbags. They were the kind of people willing to walk into a one-night no holds barred fighting tournament in a dimly lit arena in Colorado just to see what happened. 

The latest Sports Stories zine is all about what went down in the novelty shaped ring in that dimly lit arena. We cover the competitors and action of the very first Ultimate Fighting Championship: from the absurdity of Art Jimmerson facing down Royce Gracie wearing a single boxing glove to the mysterious saluting of Dutch savate master Gerard Gordeau. 

You’ll also notice something else about this zine: it looks incredible. The founders of UFC have spent years arguing over who gets credit for the octagon-shaped ring. (We are pretty sure the idea came from Hollywood legend John Milius). Either way, the credit for the octagon in this case goes to Adam, who took the time to hand cut these zines into eight-sided beauties. Inside, you’ll find killer drawings of fighting men, fighting animals, and more.

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Because of the amount of work that has gone into their construction, the UFC 1 zine will be a limited edition. There will only be 100 of these. So if you want one, now is the time. 

In addition to the zine, we’ve got a new shirt available with both long and short sleeves. It’s stylish as hell, and can be worn before, during, and after mixed martial arts training. Buy one for all seasons. 

BUY THE DANG SHIRT

Thank you for reading Sports Stories, and continuing to support this project. We’re excited to bring you physical objects made with great care — and we hope that you enjoy them.

Some years ago, Adam and I discovered an internet message board devoted to the singer Morrissey that featured a long post by some anonymous person about how they had repeatedly run into Mike Piazza at his shows, including in the front row at the Greek Theater in LA.

I can’t find it now, but we always appreciated the fact that Mike was willing to get down to The Smiths and Morrissey (current politics notwithstanding). I looked for that post the other day but couldn’t find it. In his autobiography, Long Shot, Piazza talks about how a minor league teammate got him into The Smiths, Oingo Boingo, and other new wave type bands.

Anyway, we sold out of our first run of Mike Piazza Zines over the weekend, and w want to say thank you to everybody who ordered. Meanwhile, Adam is printing and constructing new ones literally as we speak — which means that if you order by end of day Tuesday December 14, there’s still time for us to get them to you before Christmas.

ENTER THE SPORTS STORIES STORE

Below is a sonnet from the zine. It is called “The Heir.”

I meant to write an epic poem about 

The young Piazza in Los Angeles:

His size. His hair. Striding from the dugout 

To a welcome like the one Odysseus

Was hoping for back in Ithaca;

The crash and soar of each home run.

The fact that he had become mythic 

In the Ravine alongside Jose Offerman. 

There he goes down Sunset Boulevard,

The love of millions glinting in a pair 

Of wraparound shades. A baseball card

Could never tell you why this was the son, the heir.

A baseball card could not describe the space

Dividing what we felt and what he faced.  

Thank you for supporting Sports Stories. Be sure to hit up our store for zines, t-shirts, and more. We hope you have a happy holidays.

In March 1998, recently retired Dodgers center fielder Brett Butler told a reporter that the team had struggled the previous season because it lacked leadership -- especially from Mike Piazza. 

“Mike Piazza is a moody, self-centered, ‘90s player,” Butler said. 

Many of Piazza’s teammates stood up for him in the press, including third baseman Todd Zeile:

“You don’t need to hear a voice from the grave. If Brett felt that bad about this, why didn’t he say that to him face to face?”

A few days later, Tommy Lasorda gave an interview to the New York Post during which he spoke at length about Piazza -- the man whose career he had nurtured for literally decades, going way back to Norristown, Pennsylvania. 

“How can a guy who hits .330 with 40 home runs and knocks in 120 runs not be good for a team? No catcher has ever done what he’s done.”

Lasorda was right. No catcher had ever done what Piazza was doing. So of course, two months later, the Dodgers traded him. 

Adam and I are very excited to share our latest project: PIAZZA, a small, handmade book of poems and drawings about everybody’s favorite “moody, self-centered, ‘90s player.”  

We have talked for years about making a zine like this -- something that would capture the man and his vibe during his run with the Dodgers in LA. And what better way to do that than with a sonnet cycle?

The poems in PIAZZA draw lovingly on classic works of literature from W.B. Yeats to The Big Lebowski. The illustrations bring out the essence of not only the player, but the time and place of his reign in Southern California. 

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We hope you pick one up as a gift to yourself or the baseball fan in your life. It will make for great reading during the holiday season and also good company during what is sure to be an extensive and depressing labor stoppage in Major League Baseball. 

Fair warning to Mets fans: this zine does not get into his career in Flushing. 

Along with PIAZZA the book, you can also buy a new “Mike Piazza, Los Angeles Catcher” t-shirt designed by Adam. It’s a really nice shirt — and like the zine, it makes a wonderful gift. 

GET THE PIAZZA SHIRT

Finally, since it’s apparently 1990s week at Sports Stories, we also have a new limited edition hat for sale, inspired by our favorite trading card brand. It’s perfect for wearing to school, to the mall, or to the taping of an MTV Rock N' Jock Softball game if they ever bring that back.

You should also know that these hats truly are limited edition: there are 12 of them in the entire world, and Adam and I are keeping two for ourselves, which means that we are only selling 10. They are embroidered on deadstock denim with suede bills. 

GET THE NEW SPORTS STORIES HAT

Thank you for reading Sports Stories, and continuing to support this project. We’re excited to bring you physical objects made with great care — and we hope that you enjoy them.

Ernie Barnes was a professional football player before he was a professional painter. But he was an artist before he was any kind of an athlete. He was an artist from the time he was a young boy in North Carolina. His mother was a housekeeper for a wealthy white lawyer, and sometimes Ernie would go with her to work and spend hours on the couch leafing through books of paintings by old masters. 

“By the time I started first grade, I knew Rembrandt,” Barnes told the Los Angeles Times. “I knew the works of Michelangelo.”

He was pudgy and shy and he hid from the world behind his sketchbook until a junior high school teacher pulled him into the weightroom. A few years later, he was getting a full ride scholarship to play football, and a few years after that, he was drafted by the Baltimore Colts as an offensive lineman. 

Barnes bounced around from the Colts to the New York Titans to the San Diego Chargers to the Denver Broncos. He struck up a lifelong friendship with Jack Kemp, the future Bob Dole running mate. His teammates called him Big Rembrandt -- one of the best sports nicknames of all time, I think. His coaches used to chew him out and fine for sketching during practice. Then Barnes realized he had simply had enough.

“One day on the playing field I looked up and the sun was breaking through the clouds, hitting the unmuddied areas on the uniforms, and I said, ‘That’s beautiful!’ I knew then that it was all over being a player. I was more interested in art. So I traded my cleats for canvas, my bruises for brushes, and put all the violence and power I’d felt on the field into my paintings.”

This is the last official Sports Stories newsletter in its current weekly form. I can’t say that Adam or I had a moment like Ernie Barnes did, with the sun breaking through the clouds. But that’s okay -- because it’s not all over for us. It’s just changing. We’re not done writing and drawing about weirdo sports history. We’re just done with publishing through this particular venture-capital backed platform on a weekly basis in exchange for donations. 

I’m going to use this final newsletter to offer a small peek behind the scenes. There were some weeks when I wrote the entire story before I saw what Adam had drawn. There were other weeks where we kind of staggered through it all together. And there were others still when I started with his drawings, and the writing followed from whatever emotion they stirred. Those were my favorite weeks. His work has made my writing better, and it has also made me better at simply appreciating art. 

This is one of the reasons I am glad we are ending on a painter. I’m glad because it’s appropriate. Sports Stories is a visual medium. It seems like it would be impossible for me, without the toolkit of an art critic, to truly describe the work of Ernie Barnes. But I can say that you might recognize it. For example, this painting Sugar Shack: 

What I like about his paintings is that they are instantly empathetic. What I like about them is the way they seem to be in motion even in the stillness inherent to their form. There is life in them. The good parts and the bad. Barnes said that he painted people with their eyes closed because he thought we were blind to one another’s suffering. 

He quit football and transitioned immediately into a career as a working artist. In what is probably the most unique example of arts patronage I can think of, Barnes continued to collect his AFL salary for a full season while painting full time, thanks to the generosity (and creativity) of New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin.

Here’s a paragraph from the biography on Barnes’ website that I find compelling: 

All his life, Barnes was ambivalent about his football experience. In interviews and in personal appearances, Barnes said he hated the violence and the physical torment of the sport. However, his years as an athlete gave him unique, in-depth observations. “(Wilson) told me to pay attention to what my body felt like in movement. Within that elongation, there’s a feeling, an attitude and expression. I hate to think, had I not played sports, what my work would look like.”

Think about how much conviction it would take to quit a job as a professional athlete to become a painter. With kids to feed, with the pressure of your peers and coaches, with the fact that for as hard as it was to make it as a pro athlete, making it as a fine artist in 1960s America must have been a hundred times harder.  

But Ernie Barnes did it. The art caught on. The elongated figures in his work became instantly recognizable. Barnes painted commissions and album covers. He moved to Los Angeles. Rich and famous people bought his canvases, and galleries displayed them. He wasn’t a football player anymore, or even a former football player. He was just Ernie Barnes the artist. 

Thank you for reading Sports Stories. We will be back after the Thanksgiving holiday with an exciting update on the future of this project.

The story describes Perez as one would any other promising football prospect, complete with a scouting report from her coach:

One future star is 17-year-old quarterback and defensive back Lisa Perez. The five-foot-three, 125-pound quarterback graduated from Whitehall-Yearling High School last spring. “She’s got a lot of natural ability, speed, and quickness,” Knapper explained. “And she’s an outstanding scrambler and a good passer too. The way she’s developing, I’d say she’s a potential all-pro.”

This is all amazing because of a.) how normal it seems and b.) because the fact that for 15-ish years, there was a vibrant women’s professional football league in America is completely unknown to most people. It was unknown to me, before reading an article by a writer named Britni de la Cretaz in 2019 on the Toledo Troopers. 

Now Britni has teamed with Lyndsey D’Arcangelo to turn that article into a book called “Hail Mary: The Rise and Fall of the National Women’s Football League.” This is the kind of subject that we would briefly touch on in Sports Stories -- highlighting Lisa Perez or Sunday Jones, a singer who toured the country with the Ohio Players before giving it up to play wide receiver for the Toledo Troopers -- before telling you to go read something more deeply researched.

Well, this book is deeply researched. It’s also empathetically reported, and entertainingly told. It has, as the internet’s David J. Roth put it in a YouTube interview with the co-authors, a layer of “good-natured 70’s scuzz.” It also has really smart critical analysis from writers I admire. I wanted to know more about it, so I reached out to Britni (who I’ve known for a while), and they were kind enough to indulge me in a conversation about their writing process. The conversation Between Britni and I has been edited and condensed for your sanity. 

Let’s talk about where this book came from. It’s about a slice of the history of America and sports that is not talked about, and doesn't even have a faint echo in people's minds -- at least didn't before this. How did that come about? And what did you feel like was your obligation to these women who were writing about? 

Initially it was just going to be a book about women in football that Lyndsey and I were going to write together because I was looking for a book like that and it didn’t exist. But I also didn’t know a ton about football and she does. So we had an idea that we could do this together. That first book did not sell. But in the course of researching it, we discovered this league and specifically we discovered it because of the Toledo Troopers, who are the winningest pro football team of all time, men's or women's, or to this day. 

I also had a sports column at Longreads. I was just starting it and it was actually very much in the vein of what you do at Sports Stories, where I would go back in history and try to rewrite a narrative that either has been forgotten or erased or was maybe only told from one side. And the first piece that I reported for that was about the Troopers. 

I set out to ask what happens when the winningest team loses their first game, and I recreated that loss. And that’s when I realized how rich this material was, and how much material was there. Because you realize there was a whole league, and there were all these teams that played. But you’d Google and there was not even a Wikipedia page for the league. There is now. It was made yesterday by some folks that read the book, which is really cool. But these teams were nowhere. Like, there’s an AngelFire page being kept by some guy and that was it. So I think that’s where we realized that this was the story that needed to be told -- and the players are still alive to be able to tell it to us. So this was the time to do it. 

What was it like meeting these players decades after their careers and kind of holding their stories in your hands? I did a book about people who had mostly died, and I felt a tremendous amount of stress and obligation to them, even despite that. I wonder what it would be like to do that with people who were there to read it. 

I was really nervous about what people's reaction was going to be. I have not heard anything negative yet. Anyone who's mad at us has not told us. These women have been waiting 40-plus years for someone to ask them about this. They thought they were forgotten. They thought it didn't matter to the world. But it mattered so much to them. Most of them only played a few seasons and may pretty consistently described them as the best years of their life.

Some of the players were afraid to talk to us because they didn't know if we were legit and they didn't want to give such a precious story away to somebody that wasn't going to do justice to it. So I really think about that responsibility. Some of the players who are more accessible because they text or whatever -- I really went back a lot to them. I would say, “Hey, I'm hearing that you told me this. I'm recognizing that this was the time period that it was happening. Would it be a misrepresentation for me to draw this conclusion about your motives?” I really didn't want to put words in people's mouths.

Their job is to tell me their story, but it's my job to make meaning out of that story and to examine it from a larger lens. And I also knew I was taking a story from somebody, right? You lose agency over a story when you give it to somebody else to tell. Lyndsey and I both tried to be as responsible as possible.

Buy Hail Mary!

We had an excerpt in Sports Illustrated, and Linda Stamps, who was one of the women who founded the Columbus Pacesetters, she's kind of the main character in that excerpt, texted me the day it ran and was just like, “I don't know how to thank you because I'm in Sports Illustrated today as a football player. My childhood dream came true.”

That was such an intense thing to realize how much it means. It’s an enormous responsibility that we both carry with us and take really seriously. Also, I will say, I hope some of these women do get to speak for themselves. We have a list of players who are really happy to do press. And I hope that people will take us up on that and that they'll have the opportunity to share their stories in their own words as well.

What was it like having a co-writer in Lyndsey? Had you done stories that way as a journalist before?

Weirdly I'm co-writing more stuff now. But in general, no. Most of my stuff was just me. Lyndsey was great. We complemented each other really well. The scope of this league is so great. There were so many teams ,and the number of people and the amount of information that you're trying to track down -- I was actually really glad to have her as a person to split it with. I think if I was doing this alone or if she was doing this alone, it would have been a different book because we bring different things to the project. Also it would have taken a lot longer than it did. 

But we worked together really well. And I think we also just both really trusted the other person's process and the other person's voice, which allowed us to kind of settle in and do our best work. Lyndsey is a much more structured writer. She writes every day and has worked on the book every day from the day we got our book deal and has never missed a deadline in her journalistic career. I believe deadlines are suggested start dates for your projects and I wrote 20,000 words of the book and the week before it was due to our editor. So we just had wildly different processes and it could have gone really, really wrong. And luckily it did not. And I think that's because we had so much respect for each other as writers. 

Lyndsey comes from a fiction background, which I think a lot of people don't know because she's also a sports writer. But so she's written YA fiction books. And so she brought a lot of the character depth and the storytelling chops. And I did a lot of the critical analysis, and also I was the nerd doing a color-coded post-it note visualization of our structure and reading all of the other narrative nonfiction books for ideas on what our should look like and stuff like that. We definitely came from different places, but it all worked really well together. 

Did your research and reporting on this book and writing it change your perspective of America in the seventies in particular, and how you thought about the country?

It complicates these very pat understandings that we have. Look back and you'll see Title IX happened in 1972 and the league started in 1974. So the conclusion from many folks is that it was a result of that. Well, no, it wasn't. These teams weren't affiliated with schools. Some of the players who were college students benefited from Title IX because they were maybe on a softball team that was formed because of Title IX, or there were other organized sports that they could play in college that they wouldn't have been able to a few years before that. But if the players were older, that was out of reach to them. And also there's a class-based thing happening here where if there are working class folks or folks who work in the trades, they're not playing sports through those institutions. So that's a place where sure, some of the women are impacted by Title IX, but it had nothing to do with the league and many of the players to this day, when I asked about Title IX, they said, “what's that?”

Or that if you look at the newspaper coverage of the time, journalists really wanted to portray these women as women's libbers because why else would women want to play football? And when you look at some of the few things that have been written about the league, you know, they really paint these women as like feminist activists who are playing during the women's liberation movement. And that narrative is not one that 90% of the women claim for themselves. It felt really irresponsible to shoehorn that and to put those motives in these women's mouths, because at the time they didn't think of themselves that way, and they still, for the most part, don't. Some have come to think of it that way. 

What I think it it did for me was it kind of complicated what we think about movements and how they work even like queer liberation, post Stonewall. These women were, you know, in the Rust Belt or the South and Stonewall was not on their radar at all. It’s not that simple. There’s a lot of class and region based analysis that goes into those movements that I think sometimes gets really flattened. 

What did you do to unflatten it as you're writing the book? How, how much do you think about portraying politics and injecting that kind of analysis?

I think our solution there was to not put any words in people's mouths and to be really clear about how they formed their own conclusions about what they did and where they stood. 

We can also reflect on the ways that change happens in society, and that exists outside of organizing meetings or picket lines. Right? You don't have to think of yourself as an activist to actually be responsible for pushing society forward. All you have to be is somebody who refuses to toe the line or who is willing to do what you're being told that you can't do. And something that all of these women have in common is that they played football at a time when the world told them they absolutely should not be doing that and they could not do it. And so just by playing football, by doing this thing, they love, they actually are taking a stance and creating change. 

Those realities can coexist. There's a chapter called “Unwitting Activists” because they may not claim feminism for themselves, but a lot of them were women working in male dominated fields: they were the only women climbing telephone lines, you know, they were their mechanics. These women were the first women to enter the workplace in certain fields. They’re dealing with all of that as well. They don't have to claim feminism for themselves to have been kind of living the politics of “what does it mean to demand more for women or people of a marginalized gender?”

Is there somebody who you wrote about whose story and personality drew you in in an emotional way that kind of went above and beyond your expectations? I know that happens to me as a journalist sometimes. 

My most meaningful conversation, and actually the one who has I think become a breakout star based on reader reception so far, is a woman named D.A. Starkey. She played for the Dallas Bluebonnets. She was such a big personality, and she was so open with the way that her queerness and her queer community overlapped with her desire to play football. 

She was also just really open about -- she’s 30 years sober now, and I’m in 12-step recovery as well. We talked a lot about that. A lot of that did not make it into the book. But at the time she wasn’t sober, and she’s in these bars a lot, and really unabashed about “I didn’t read a newspaper. I didn’t know what Stonewall was. I didn’t even know there was a football team because I didn’t read the newspaper. Somebody had to tell me.” She's really funny. 

I was talking to her and the Bluebonnets team at a time in my life where I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do personally. Shortly into my interviews with the Bluebonnets players, I ended up asking my husband for a divorce, and a lot of it had to do with my conversations that I had with queer elders, and really realizing how badly I wanted them to recognize me as part of the community, and realizing the ways in which my personal life situation rubbed up uncomfortably for me. It was a catalyst for me asking for a divorce, the first two months of starting to report this book. And the players knew that a little bit, because you’re in touch. And they were really lovely, like, “We’ve been out for 50 years, let us tell you about it.” 

And I ended up with this really beautiful intergenerational moment. You’re a journalist, right? I didn't expect to develop friendships with these women, but it felt different from the way I source most of my work and the source relationships I have with most of the reporting I do.

Books are different, right? Emotionally for me, it was all-encompassing. I dreamed about my book every night and the people in it. And their lives became deeply intertwined with mine and my family’s lives. It was very immersive. It sounds like you had that experience too -- and in even more profound ways than I did. 

I had pictures of the women on my wall as I wrote. It’s really important to remember who you're writing for and why. And then they're so excited to have their story told and you're getting texts from them when they remember something or even jus they're sending me newspaper clippings about girls playing football. They're still sending me their NFL predictions every Sunday, and I haven't been able to tell them I don't watch football, because they're so excited to connect about that. One of the women sent Lyndsey care packages of snacks while Lyndsey was writing.

It was very different from the way I usually think about sourcing. And plus you have to go back. There's some women that we talked to once, and that was all we were going to get, you know? And there are some that were really, really involved. The ones that would answer text messages and go through really specific details and get on the phone with you whenever you needed to. It really felt like there were partners in the work in some ways.

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

Buy Hail Mary!

Before we get to this week’s subject, we have a short programming note. In two weeks, we will hit the one year anniversary of this project “going paid” (by which we mean accepting paid subscriptions while remaining completely free). At that point, Sports Stories is going to change . 

Adam and I have been honored and inspired by the support we’ve received from you -- not just the money, but the kind emails and words of appreciation. Sports Stories is the best and purest expression of our friendship and our work together. But the nature of our collaboration has also always been marked by our creative restlessness. 

The plan, roughly, is that we’re going to focus our energy on making physical media that folks can buy and hold in their hands. We will also be turning off paid subscriptions. That means if you are paying us $5 a month, those payments will halt. If you are an annual subscriber, we will be refunding you a prorated amount of your contribution based on when you signed up. 

We’re excited about the future of Sports Stories. We’re excited, because we like new challenges and we like trying new things -- get ready for an amazing transition here -- just like the subject of this week’s newsletter, Dottie Frazier. 

Dottie was born in Long Beach, California in 1922. She still lives there, and in her 99 years, she’s never been afraid of challenging herself or trying something new or doing something that seemed absolutely insane to outsiders. Her career as a swimmer, freediver, and scuba pioneer began early. Her father loved the water, and had her out on his boat from the beginning. She was swimming at just three years old, and diving deep down into the Pacific at six. 

Dottie loved her father, and just like him, she loved the water. She was always in it or near it. Swimming and freediving and spearfishing and sailing. In the beginning, she used homemade masks fashioned by her father. By the 1940s, she was teaching freediving around Long Beach. Then, when scuba diving caught on, she was in the front of the line to get a certification. Instructors initially tried to turn her away. Instead, she stuck around and became the first woman scuba instructor in America. 

In 2019, the writer Rich Archbold wrote a lovely story about Dottie in the Long Beach Press Telegram. He spent a lot of time with her, and did a great job portraying her personality. But what I took away from it was the sheer amount of stuff she did. Here is a representative passage: 

She was the first woman to commercially produce both drysuits and wetsuits under her own line, Penguin Suits. She was the first woman to own a dive shop, where she runs dive classes and sells her wetsuits. She also trained as the first woman hard-hat diver for two years. She was a charter member of the Long Beach Neptunes dive club. She used a spear gun to kill a wild boar which was attacking her on Catalina Island.

In a non-diving first, she was the first Girl Scout in Long Beach.

She also has been a swimsuit model, a competitive billiards player and a water and snow skier.

She knows how to fix auto transmissions and used to ride her Harley-Davidson around the region. She sold her last motorcycle, a Kawasaki, earlier this year after the DMV would no longer renew her motorcycle license. But she still drives a car, and her auto drivers license has been renewed until 2023.

What amazes me most about Dottie Frazier is the way her life seems to have balanced these cinematic achievements with modest pleasures: family, community, domesticity. She has lived in Long Beach for her whole life, and in the same little house for 80 years. She raised four sons. She told Archbold that her father lived to be 99 and that before he died, he told her that she had to reach 100 for him. She’s almost there. 

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In addition to the reporting by Rich Archbold (he also did a story on how Dottie survived the 1933 Long Beach earthquake), I enjoyed this YouTube interview she did with Alec Pierce Scuba. 

A few years ago, Dottie published a memoir called Trailblazer: The Extraordinary Life of Diving Pioneer Dottie Frazier. 

Finally, the website SkinDivingHistory.com has some awesome photos of Dottie over the course of her life. 

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In many parts of the country, including where I live, today is Election Day. Despite the fact that our democracy is clearly broken, corrupted, and somehow getting worse every day, I still love voting in a sincere and corny way. I can’t help it. I want to believe. This week’s Sports Stories is about an athlete-turned-politician. It’s about the good things that can happen in America, and also the bad things that give the good ones their shape. 

Ralph Metcalfe was born in Georgia in 1910, but he was a little boy when his family moved to the South Side of Chicago. That’s where he grew up. The son of a stockyard worker and a seamstress. In high school, Ralph started running track. His coach told him that as a Black man he had to be more than just faster, he had to put actual daylight between himself and his competition. Metcalfe did that. 

He ran all the way to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles, and straight into the finals of the 100M sprint at the brand new Memorial Coliseum. It was a close race. As close as they get. Metcalfe appeared to cross the finish line at the exact same moment as his teammate Eddie Tolan. It was quite literally a photo finish. And the judges examined the photo for what seemed like hours before finally awarding the gold medal to Tolan.

The photo they used was by no means definitive. And video recordings appear to show Metcalfe crossing first. But it didn’t matter. A few days later, Metcalfe finished behind Tolan again in the 200M. This time, he finished third. After the race, Metcalf insisted he had been running in an improperly measured lane that was in fact at least two meters too long. But it was too late.

Metcalfe never really believed that he had lost fair and square in either race. But he wore the defeats gracefully. He went back to school at Marquette University (where he also converted to Catholicism) and waited for his next turn at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. That time, his principal competition was another teammate: Jesse Owens. Once again, Metcalfe found himself in second place in the 100M. Then, in the 200M, he finished third behind Owens and Mack Robinson (the older brother of Jackie). 

That should have been it for Ralph Metcalfe’s Olympic career: three silver medals and a bronze: a legacy to be proud of. But then, two days before the 4x100M relay, the American track coaches decided to make a change to their lineup. Two racers, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman were dropped from the team. Their replacements would be Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. 

At the time, American coaches argued that the changes were made to give the American team its best chance to win. But Stoller and Glickman were fast -- and they had been brought to Berlin specifically to compete in this race. Everybody knew the real reason they had been dropped. It was because they were Jewish. 

Avery Brundage, the head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was a known anti-Semite. So was American track coach Dean Cromwell. They were approached by Nazi officials via backchannels officials to remove he Jewish sprinters -- so they did. Metcalfe and Owens argued that this was unfair, but were not in a position to do much about it.

“I resented the fact that they left two Jewish boys off the team, Sam Stoller and Marty Glickman,  in order to satisfy the Nazi people over there,” Metcalfe said years later. “It was our team. We were not supposed to have Germany dictate to us, nor their philosophy, nor their politics dictate to us.” 

But this was how Metcalfe won his gold medal. And this was the experience he brought with him back to the United States after the games. He taught at Xavier University in New Orleans and coached the track team. He served in the Army in World War II and became an officer. Then he went back home to Chicago, where he quickly got involved in electoral politics. 

Metcalfe was elected to his local Democratic committee in 1952. Three years later, he ran for alderman and won. Soon, he became a key cog in the political machine of all powerful Mayor Richard Daley. He was a status quo moderate Democrat. This was where things stood until 1970 when he ran for an open seat in congress -- and with Daley’s backing, easily won. 

Metcalfe could have been a yes man in congress and continued to do Daley’s bidding. It would have been easy. But that wasn't what happened. In his first year in office, he became one of the founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus. In his second, he broke with the political machine that had supported his career for decades. 

It was an ugly and bitter split. Metcalfe came to believe that the Daley administration was intentionally ignoring racist police violence in the city -- and thus tacitly endorsing it. Metcalfe had power and he decided to use it. He called for the resignation of the Chicago police superintendent and his staff. He became, for the first time in his career, an activist, using his office to hold hearings and his platform to draw media attention to the issue. It was a risky turn in what had been a fairly cautious career. 

"I know the political realities of what I'm doing,” Metcalfe said at the time. “I'm willing to pay whatever political consequences I have to, but frankly I don't think there will be any.”

Daley stripped Metcalfe of his position in the local Democratic party, and ran a candidate against him in his 1974 primary. But those moves only crystallized Metcalfe’s position, and the feud with Daley only strengthened his resolve. He spoke out against the Daley machine, joined forces with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, and began to reframe his career in terms of civil rights.

“I am the same Ralph Metcalfe,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1976. “The only difference is that I no longer represent the 3rd Ward and the 1st Congressional District but all oppressed people.”

Metcalfe died suddenly in 1978 of a sudden heart attack while back home in Chicago during a congressional recess.  He was 68 years old. 

“I think it’s God’s will that I never won an individual gold medal,” Metcalfe said in an interview late in his life. “I make no apologies for that. It’s great experience, it’s good training, it prepares you for life. I think it prepared me well. I wonder what would have happened if I had won all four gold medals. I don’t think it would have changed, but it may have. I don’t think so. But I think losing made me a bigger person and helped me to face the realities of life.”

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Ralph Metcalfe’s official congressional biography is actually surprisingly thorough, and even includes references. There are also lots of newspaper clippings out there from both his track career and his political career. I thought this New York Times story from the campaign trail in 1975 was insightful, as was this 1991 Chicago Tribune piece about the sons of Metcalfe and Daley burying the hatchet on the feud. I also enjoyed this interview between the writers Karen Johnson and Tim Neary in the Religion in American History blog.

Finally, there is incredible footage of Metcalfe in the Olympics in this video clip, backed up with some really great interviews with him. I wish I could tell you what the source documentary is, but I cannot:

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One of the first important lessons I learned in sports writing was this: every pro athlete is a miracle. Every person who fulfills their potential and gets the opportunity to play a sport for money in front of adoring crowds (large or small) deserves appreciation. The job is so hard, and so rare, and so tenuous, that the lasting presence of, say, John Salley, at the end of an NBA bench deserves to be celebrated. Because there are always reasons it shouldn’t happen. There are always circumstances. 

Every town has a Curtis Jones. Sometimes it’s a bad injury, or a tragic accident, or a missed opportunity. Someone picked the wrong day to have a bad day, or catch a cold, or miss their bus. But only one town had the real Curtis Jones. Detroit. And for Jones, it was so much more than a missed opportunity. The circumstances -- well, everything was circumstances. 

Jones grew up in Detroit when the city was cresting: the cars were rolling off the lines, and the hits were rolling out of Motown Records. His father worked on the assembly line for Chrysler. As a boy, Jones used to dribble a basketball everywhere he went. From the family home all the way downtown and back. Four miles there with his left hand, four miles back with his right. Basketball was all he loved. 

When he was 12 years old, Jones’ father died of cancer. “I took it hard,” he said later. “And I didn’t care about much at all for a long time.” He narrowed his world to the basketball court. He was smallish. Short of six feet, and skinny. But it didn’t matter. The word everybody seemed to use was genius. He could make the ball do whatever he wanted. He could see the court with his eyes closed. 

Jones played at Detroit Northwestern High School, where one of his teammates was the future MLB slugger John Mayberry. In 1967, he hit a buzzer beater to defeat a rival team that featured future NBA players Ralph Simpson and Spencer Haywood. 

“He was just a phenomenal player,” Haywood said later. “For young players that want to know what it was like. The stuff that Magic Johnson did as a player, Curtis Jones was the first player to do it. Not that kind of size, but he had the skillset to do all of those things. He was just incredible.”  

In the intervening years, the legend of Curtis Jones has grown increasingly vague and mystical. His legacy exists in the memories of people like Haywood. The tales of his skill get passed down from generation to generation in Detroit. He could dribble across the court in three strides and dunk it. He could go an entire game without taking a single shot, racking up assists, only to casually sink the winner as time expired. There is no known surviving video footage of Jones on the basketball court. This is because of what happened to him in high school and shortly afterward. 

Jones was the victim of a system that was designed to squeeze the greatness out of him and offer nothing in return. He had learning disabilities from a young age, but never got the support he needed in school. He never learned to read or to write his own name. But he was shuffled along from grade to grade, all the way through high school, because of what he could do on the basketball court. 

He didn’t have the grades or test scores to attend the University of Michigan, where his high school coach had taken a job as an assistant. So after graduating from Detroit Northwestern, he took a deal. Go off to junior college in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, and get your grades up. When you do, there will be a spot waiting for you in Ann Arbor. 

But that never happened. In Idaho, Jones was isolated. He was at a college full of white people in a city full of white people in a state full of white people. And he still couldn’t read. How was he supposed to get his grades up with no friends, no family, no institutional support? He broke down emotionally. Coeur d’Alene was nothing like Detroit, except for one thing. The institutions in his life only needed him to be one thing: a basketball player. 

As I was learning the story of Curtis Jones I was struck repeatedly by the amount of people who used the word “genius” to describe him. There’s something poignant about it. He was a basketball genius, and a thoughtful person off the court. But he couldn’t read or write. I began to think about how absurd it is that we tie athletic success to academic success. I began to think about how reading and writing is such a narrow way to judge a person’s intelligence, and ultimately measure their value. 

I began to think about the fact that decades later, we still live in a country that values athletic genius, and has an entrenched sports system that pretends to care about the well-being and academic success of its most talented athletes while it is in fact only extracting value from them. Curtis Jones didn’t need Detroit Northwestern, or Northern Idaho Junior College, or the promise of the University of Michigan to get to the NBA; he didn’t need the NCAA’s hypocritical definition of a student-athlete. He needed somebody to care enough to help him. 

Curtis Jones became an urban legend. descended into mental illness. He moved back to Detroit. He existed in the present, wandering the streets of his old neighborhood, and in the past, frozen in glory. He dwelled on that game winning shot from 1967. He found himself in and out of the Northville psychiatric hospital. 

It didn’t have to go that way. Spencer Haywood also suffered from learning disabilities. He had also been unable to read or write. But in high school, he finally found the support he needed. And when he went off to a junior college in a lonely place, he made it out, to the pros, the Hall of Fame, and a successful post-playing career in business.

In 1982, Jones and his family launched a lawsuit against all the institutions that had betrayed him. The Detroit Public Schools. Northern Idaho Junior College. The former coach who had dangled the promise of the University of Michigan before him. He had a compelling case to make. But after years of legal battles, the Michigan State Supreme Court declined to hear it. 

“I don’t know who’s to blame except maybe all of us,” Haywood said later. “Curtis’s failure is America’s failure.” 

In 1990, a writer named Shelby Strother caught up with Jones and his family for a long and heart-wrenching story in the Detroit Free Press. There’s Curtis Jones in the small room at his mother’s home. There’s Curtis Jones reenacting that fateful shot from 1967 in the alley behind the house. There’s Curtis Jones plainly laying out the painful circumstances that derailed his life, and then pleading, pleading for someone to understand that it didn’t have to be this way. 

“I got too close to my dream and my soul could not bear it. But someone let me get too close, you hear me? I can’t read, can’t write. Never could. I knew it would catch up to me. I always had an inferior complex. Man when you can’t read nothing, you can’t feel no other way. But I can still play ball like a bitch. Still the greatest dribbler of all time. You hear me?”

Jones passed away in 1999. 

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Unsurprisingly, Curtis Jones was featured prominently in Detroit newspapers both during and after his playing career. But the best story I read on him was the aforementioned 1990 feature by Shelby Strother. The article is not freely available online, but please feel free to email if you want a PDF. Honestly, this story was so good that I went and looked up the author because it was amazing to me that he never became famous -- or as famous as sports writers get. 

It turns out, the feature on Jones was one of the last big stories Shelby Strother ever got to write. He died of cancer in 1991. He was only 44 years old.  Before that, Strother had written for papers in Florida and Colorado. I enjoyed this remembrance of Strother by one of his mentees, a journalist named Reggie Connell. 

There was also a 30-minute documentary about Curtis Jones released in 2015, called Fouled Out. It features a lot of Detroit hoops legends (including Haywood and Jalen Rose) talking about Jones and his legacy. You can stream it for free on Vimeo.

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I recently interviewed a famous sports photographer for another publication, and he said something that kind of struck me: that part of his job was to make the athletes he shot look like heroes. In a way, that’s all of our jobs. So much of the sports media industrial complex depends on our collective ability to turn athletes into symbols, even as we are ostensibly humanizing them.

The bigger they come, the harder they fall. The bigger they come, the bigger they win. The bigger they come, the more people watch and read and open their wallets. So we inflate them until they stop being human beings and start to exist merely as symbols. LeBron James is as much of a tall tale as Paul Bunyan ever was. 

This week’s subject is Grandma Gatewood, whose life at first glance looks like mythology; like a story that was told and retold over generations and only then found its true form. But Grandma Gatewood was as real as you or me, and her achievements -- though much more contemporary -- hearken back to the frontier past that gave us Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed. 

Even just the one-line description sounds like a folktale. The grandmother who walked the length of the Appalachian Trail alone, carrying only a small drawstring sack; who then kept walking and walking all across the country, gathering followers and well-wishers and supporters everywhere she went. It sounds like something from 1855, not 1955. 

Emma Gatewood was born in 1887 in Southern Ohio farm country, and that’s where she was raised.  Her father was an ornery veteran of the Union Army, who had lost a leg in the war but gained an appetite for whiskey and gambling. She had 14 brothers and sisters. From a young age, she knew what it was to work and to suffer. When she needed peace and quiet, she found it in the woods. She liked to read poetry.  

She married a schoolteacher when she was just 19. He was a bad person. He beat her frequently and mercilessly, and abused her sexually. He put her to work endless hours even as she bore him 11 children and took care of the home. She still had the woods to escape to, but that was no real escape. It took her decades to get away for good. By the time she did, it was 1941. Emma Gatewood was 54 years old. 

But in a sense, her life was just beginning. In 1949, while sitting in a doctor’s office waiting room, she read an article about the Appalachian Trail in National Geographic. The article made the trail (which runs all the way from Georgia to Maine) sound easy. “Planned for the enjoyment of anyone in good health, the A.T. doesn’t demand special skill or training to traverse.” 

It is worth mentioning here that this story was told beautifully in a book called Grandma Gatewood’s Walk written by a newspaper reporter named Ben Montgromery who also happens to be one of Emma Gatewood’s descendants. It was Montgomery who dug up that old National Geographic story, and who placed her in that doctor’s office, and even chose that particular passage to highlight. 

Anyway, as he put it “the old woman had been captivated.” 

She didn’t tell anybody of her plans. She simply started walking, ten miles a day. She did a few overnight trips on her own in the Ohio wilderness, just to see how she could survive. But surviving was her specialty. She had been doing it her whole life. In 1954, she set out for Maine, with a plan to hike south to Georgia. But she broke her glasses, and had to be helped back home to Ohio. The following year, she decided to try again. She told her kids she was going for a walk, and took off: this time to start in Georgia and make her way up north. 

She woke with the sun and walked each day until she couldn’t anymore. Only one person had ever thru-hiked all 2,040 miles of the Appalachian Trail before, and he was a soldier in his twenties. Grandma Gatewood presented quite the contrast. She carried only her small homemade sack stuffed with the barest essentials: a coat, a shower curtain for protection from the rain, a Swiss Army knife, some water, a flashlight, band-aids, Vienna sausages. It took her 146 days. By the time she reached Maine, she was famous.

“This is no trail. This is a nightmare,”  she told a reporter after she had finished. “I would never have started this trip if I had known how tough it was,” she added, “but I couldn’t and wouldn’t quit.” 

She did the opposite of quitting. She hiked it two more times. She also walked the length of the Oregon Trail, from Independence, Missouri to Portland, Oregon. She was written up in magazines and featured on television. She became Johnny Appleseed without the appleseeds, just a regular person doing something mythical and inspiring and also very intuitive: something anybody could understand. She didn’t talk about the years of abuse. She didn’t talk about why exactly she had to keep going. But the simple act of walking, of surviving each day, of pressing onward and onward and onward resonated with her fellow Americans. It still does.

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Emma Gatewood is one of those people who is very famous to people whose life may revolve in some way around the Appalachian Trail. If that’s you, then you know that material about her life is everywhere. But if that’s not you, I’d recommend starting with the aforementioned Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery. It’s a very readable book with a clever structure and a lot of poignant lyrical moments in it.

The New York Times also recently dedicated one of its “Overlooked No More” obituaries to Grandma Gatewood. I’m a fan of that series.

If you are interested in tall tales, or Americana, or mythologies specific to Ohio, or just really great books in general, please check out Pete Beatty’s novel Cuyahoga.

Finally, there was a film about Grandma Gatewood called Trail Magic. I have not seen it, but it is available for rental on Vimeo and features interviews with lots of her family members. Here’s a preview:

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This goes without saying, considering the nature of this newsletter, but I love writing about history. I love the way stories weave together and trace back and connect in places that you would never suspect. You can learn a lot about something, and even write about it, only to come back to that topic and find a detail that you had just completely missed. 

For example, Biz Mackey. 

A couple years ago, I published a book called Stealing Home, the climactic moment of which was the violent eviction of the Arechiga family from their home in the community of Palo Verde by sheriff’s deputies in order to make way for the construction of Dodger Stadium. I set up the scene with a chapter taking place night before the evictions. The Arechigas were sitting at home, waiting for the inevitable. Meanwhile, the newly christened Los Angeles Dodgers were playing an emotional exhibition game at the Memorial Coliseum to honor their former catcher Roy Campanella. 

Campanella, arguably the greatest catcher in big league history, had been paralyzed in a car accident shortly before the Dodgers moved to LA  from Brooklyn. For the exhibition, the Yankees came out to the west coast to honor their old rival. Sandy Koufax started for the Dodgers and nearly 100,000 people filled the stadium. It was a beautiful scene. At one point, Campanella entered the field accompanied by a few friends. The lights were dimmed and the crowd raised lighters in unison. In his autobiography, Campanella likened the stadium to a giant birthday cake ablaze in his honor. 

What I didn’t realize was that one of the people standing there on the field with Campanella was his catching mentor, Biz Mackey, a legend of the sport in his own right. Perhaps the reason I didn’t realize this was because the LA newspapers that covered the Campanella game didn’t mention Mackey. The team didn’t do anything specific to honor his presence. He was just there, supporting his friend.

Biz Mackey was widely considered the greatest defensive catcher to ever suit up in the Negro Leagues. He was also a .300 hitter, beloved manager, and a jovial personality who got the nickname Biz for his propensity to never ever close his mouth. It was Biz as in The Business, which is what he was always giving to everybody around him: whether as a boy in East Texas, a superstar in Philadelphia, or an ambassador for the game on barnstorming tours in Japan. Friends, opposing players, umpires -- Biz talked to everyone. 

Biz was born Raleigh Mackey in 1897, to a family of sharecroppers. He came up playing semi-pro ball and hopped around to increasingly talented teams as he entered his prime: the Luling Oilers, the Dallas Black Giants, the Waco Navigators, the San Antonio Black Aces. Then beyond Texas to the Indianapolis ABCs and ultimately the Hilldale Daisies in Philadelphia, where he would remain for a decade and establish himself as a superstar alongside folks like Martin Dihigo, Oscar Charleston, Judy Johnson, and Pop Lloyd.

I am wary of the practice of comparing Negro League players to their white counterparts because I think this does them an inherent disservice. You don’t need to see a player in one specific context, or through one specific lens to appreciate their abilities. If anything, I think the increased centralization of our thinking about baseball and what counts as “major league” has done harm to our ability to appreciate greatness everywhere. (This also goes for MLB recently deciding to grant Negro League stats “official recognition,” a problematic gesture that Clinton Yates wrote about very powerfully last year for The Undefeated.)

Anyway, all that said, his peers compared Mackey favorably to MLB catchers like Bucky Dent and Mickey Cochran. He wasn’t the power hitter Josh Gibson was, but a case can be made that he was the greatest defensive catcher of all time -- in any league. He became famous for all the broken fingers he suffered on his right hand, and for the way he would gun down prospective base stealers without getting out of the crouch. He also played some shortstop. Mackey’s career took him across the United States and Latin America. He also was part of multiple barnstorming tours in Japan. 

Last year, we wrote about Matsutaro Shoriki, the Japanese newspaper mogul who brought Babe Ruth to Japan in 1934 as part of a tour of big leaguers and nearly paid for it with his life, when he was attacked by an extremist wielding a samurai sword. Seven years prior, a group of Negro League stars visited Japan, and Mackey was among them. He reportedly hit the first home run at the brand new Meiji Jingu Stadium. During one game, he was struck by a pitch. The offending pitcher bowed in apology, and Mackey gained fans when he bowed back before trotting to first base. Japanese baseball was not exceptionally developed in 1927, and the Negro Leaguers earned the respect of audiences for putting on a show without showing up their opponents. They were greeted by Emperor Hirohito, who presented them with a trophy. 

During that trip to Japan, Mackey also fell in love. He met a woman named Lucille in Tokyo. They wrote letters and would see each other on future barnstorming tours, which Mackey always made sure to find a place on. When World War II came around, they lost touch. 

Mackey bounced around between teams in the 1930s and ultimately became a player-manager. It was under this capacity that he mentored Campanella. Mackey was still suiting up for the Newark Eagles as late as 1947, the year he turned 50 and the year Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby broke into white baseball. Doby had been playing for Mackey’s Newark Eagles before his contract was sold to Cleveland. 

Then something amazing happened. At some point in the years after the war, Biz and Lucille got back in touch. They were ultimately reunited in San Francisco and moved together to Los Angeles, where Mackey had played winter ball. Mackey and Lucille lived a quiet life. He worked as a forklift operator and for a change, he didn’t talk about baseball much. He walked out onto the field that night beside Roy Campanella. He passed away in 1965.

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Biz Mackey was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, which was only about fifty years too late. But to their credit, Black papers like the Pittsburgh Courier had been touting his greatness for decades. Thankfully, there’s a fair amount of material out there on Mackey. I would start with the SABR bio by Chris Rainey, which is an excellent and detailed survey. If you want even more, check out the book “Biz Mackey, a Giant Behind the Plate” by Rich Westcott. The first chapter is available to read here.

(Necessary parenthetical here: there is no evidence that there is any connection between Biz Mackey the ballplayer and Biz Markey the rapper. Just two cool dudes with similar names. To make it even more confusing, there was also a pretty successful boxer in the early twentieth century named Biz Mackey.)

I also really liked this piece by my former Vice colleague Dexter Thomas for Code Switch on NPR about the history of Black players in Japan. 

If you’re into collectibles, an original program from Mackey’s first barnstorming tour featuring a beautiful photo of him with a Japanese player on the cover recently sold for about $3,156.38.

Finally, I really enjoyed this piece by the legendary Japanese baseball historian Kazuo Sayama on how the Negro League barnstorming team spurred the development of baseball in Japan. 

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Once upon a time, I had a poetry teacher who taught us how to use a notebook properly. The point wasn’t to write down every single thing that came to your head -- though that’s fine, obviously, you can do whatever you want, it’s your notebook. The point is to see the world; really look closely at it, and seek out what she called “moments of arrested tension.”

These moments, these small visions, would be the ingredient that grounded our theoretical poems in the real world. My poems were nothing special. But I held onto that lesson and it turned out to be pretty good advice years later when I began to write magazine stories and needed to set a good scene. 

Over the past year or so, while spending a lot more time at home, I’ve realized that “moments of arrested tension” can be more than simply physical observations. They can come in the form of a line you read, a song you hear, a stanza in someone else’s poem. They can also come in the form of a story -- even one you don’t fully understand. 

Increasingly, I have come to believe that sharing these moments is the highest purpose of this newsletter. It’s a space for Adam and I to simply be amazed by things and then spread that amazement around. Sometimes I fall into the trap of needing to explain the things that amaze us. But this week I’m going to try to just get out of the way of the Beauty Pair. 

In the 1970s, women’s professional wrestling, known as joshi puroresu, became a huge sensation in Japan. It was not like women’s wrestling in the United States or Mexico which existed as part of larger promotions that mainly featured men. In Japan, women had a separate promotion all to themselves, All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling (or AJW for short). 

Somewhat liberated from the expectations and customs of men’s wrestling (though it was operated by men), AJW had its own aesthetic and its own vibe. Perhaps this was why it became so popular. Nobody defined that vibe like Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda, a pair of teenage wrestlers who teamed up in 1976 and became known as The Beauty Pair. 

I will not pretend to fully understand the appeal of The Beauty Pair, or the historical forces that made this phenomenon happen. Jackie and Maki had both been high school athletes (Jackie played basketball and Maki played volleyball). They were what you’d call classic faces -- the heroes -- and were often paired up against a villainous tag team of heels that became known as the Black Pair. 

The Beauty Pair were excellent in the ring: athletic and entertaining and dominant during their run. But they were also more than wrestlers: they were pop stars and movie stars. They also released a series of songs that became massive hits in Japan, one after the other. The catchiest one I’ve heard is called simply Beauty Pair. It is also the theme song to their movie. 

I heartily recommend watching the trailer:

If you look at footage of Beauty Pair concerts, the most striking thing is not the music in all of its ‘70s pop splendor, or the costumes, or the choreography, or the surreal fact that these two women singing and dancing are in fact professional wrestlers. The most striking thing is the crowds: full of shrieking, excited teenage girls. It’s like Jackie and Maki were, for a brief moment, The Beatles. 

The Beauty Pair did not last long as a musical act or as a wrestling tag team. But they didn’t need to. By the end of the 1970s, Jackie and Maki had achieved transcendence together. And now they could achieve it individually. They even wrestled against each other sometimes. In fact, they faced off in the final match of Maki’s career, before her retirement in 1979. Jackie retired soon afterwards.

Both women retired young because of a policy in AJW that forced its wrestlers to leave the sport behind at 26. The idea was that they would then still have time to become wives and mothers. AJW also kept tight control over the personal lives of its wrestlers and banned smoking, drinking, and public relationships with men; the idea was to keep the product innocent for the teenage girls they were marketing to.

(To get a sense of the odd way AJW promoters talked about their wrestlers in the context of gender, read this old profile of The Beauty Pair from the Honolulu Advertiser. The story will also give you a good sense of just how massively popular they were.)

Maki Ueda never looked back after her retirement. But in 1986, Jackie Sato teamed up with some other joshi stars to start a new promotion called JPW that specifically didn’t have oppressive rules, or forced retirements. She wrestled briefly for JPW before retiring again in 1988. Jackie is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the history of wrestling. The writer Dave Meltzer, whose Wrestling Observer Newsletter is as essential as a wrestling publication can be, included her in the inaugural class of the WON Hall of Fame. In 1999, Jackie fell ill and passed away from stomach cancer. She was only 41 years old.

Last week, we covered Jaromir Jagr, an athlete defined by his longevity as much as anything. But the wonderful thing about sports is that you don’t have to do the same thing for decades like Jagr to build a legacy or move people. A fad, a hot streak, a phenomenon, even a single moment can echo into perpetuity. Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda’s partnership did not last long. But it didn’t need to to matter.

Related Reading

There are lots of bits and pieces about The Beauty Pair online. But the truth is, I don’t think you can get a full bio or a truly detailed treatment without reading Japanese (which I do not). Which is all to say that the best place to find primary sources on them is via the posts of a specific Reddit user named Xalazi, who posts his finds in a subreddit for joshi puroresu fans. Xalazi, you are appreciated.

My favorite is this clip of The Beauty Pair performing a concert at a waterpark. You can also watch the entire Beauty Pair movie on YouTube, at least until somebody takes it down:

Thank you for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

You may have noticed that for the first time since we became a “paid” publication, a Tuesday came and went without a newsletter landing in your inbox. I hope that none of our subscribers got too worried, or called the authorities, or anything like that. My brother Evan got married over the weekend, and I just didn’t have the time to publish something.

One thing about Evan is that he is a big hockey fan. He also still plays ice hockey as an adult, and despite being five years younger than me, has always kicked my ass in hockey video games. So this week we’re covering the coolest hockey player to ever live, Jaromir Jagr. 

Jagr had such a long career in the NHL that I could appreciate him as an active player for different reasons as a child than I did as an adult. It began with the cool name, the cool hair, the blissful dominance in Pittsburgh. It ended in the place that certain veteran athletes get to where it’s not even about the sport anymore; it’s about the ritual. Jagr went from being a terrifying wild man to a sort of vagabond hockey spirit. 

Here are two paragraphs from a New York Times story a few years back:

Over the last 25 years, Jagr has largely avoided the major injuries that can curtail or doom careers, his frame suited for maintaining productivity across different eras. He credits his durability, in part, to achieving a spiritual balance; he and Powers speak often about opening chakras. He draws energy not only from food and sleep, he said, but also from inner peace.

“Once you get too excited, too high, too low, it’s like a brake in your car,” Jagr said, adding: “You’re in traffic, you go fast, but you’re still going to brake when someone’s going to pass you. And you spend so much gas than the guys who are going slow.”

Anyway, it’s fitting that Jagr uses a driving metaphor, because we want to talk about his first car: a 1989 Skoda Favorit 136L that he purchased back in Czechoslovakia before being drafted by the Penguins.

At some point back in his home town of Kladno, Jagr purchased this Skoda. He also managed to put a large decal of a basketball player across the hood, and take some fairly ridiculous photos with the car. Last month, a small corner of the internet exploded into a debate over who exactly this basketball player was. 

Click here for the actual photo. For some reason, Adam and I decided that this picture, this car, this debate over a basketball player on the hood decal sticker of a hockey player’s car felt like a Sports Story. We were convinced that it was Michael Jordan (the sleeve on the left knee gave it away), and with some internet sleuthing, we were able to confirm this fact. Jagr talked about it recently in what appears to be a piece of branded content for BMW and a Czech company called Invelt.

When he got to Pittsburgh, Jagr left the Skoda behind. Instead, he picked up a Pontiac Trans-Am and became semi-notorious for getting speeding tickets. Here’s a snippet from a 1992 profile in the Baltimore Sun: 

"He doesn't really understand that there is a speed limit," Stevens said. "He's gotten a lot of tickets."

How many? No one is certain and Jagr isn't telling.

"Three in one week once," he said, smiling. "I've slowed down. Probably [the last ticket] came two months ago. The police know who I am, but they don't care."

Other facts from that story: Jagr loved Kit-Kat bars (fans used to mail them to him), video games, and watching Married With Children, which he said helped him learn English. Jagr obviously did a lot of growing up in the NHL. But throughout almost his entire career, he held onto one relic of his teenage years: the Skoda. 

In 2015, Jagr finally put the car up for sale on eBay. The listing made clear that this was indeed Jagr’s first car, and that it still ran, even with upwards of 90,000 miles on it. According to one website, Jagr initially bought the Skoda for 85,000 Czech Korunas -- which at the time equaled about $3,500 USD. 

There is no record of whether the car sold, or for how much, or of what happened to the Jordan decal. But if the Skoda runs anything like its owner, it’s probably doing fine. Jagr is back in Kladno, these days. He bought the pro hockey team he played for as a teenager, and at 49 years old, well, he is still playing for them. 

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week. (On Tuesday!)

In the fall of 2014, my wife and I had just moved back to LA after a couple years in Mexico City. She was starting a Ph.D. program at UCLA, and I was working as an editor at Vice. I hadn’t lived in LA, my hometown, since the end of high school. It was nice to be home. But I also quickly realized that I was missing something. I was craving a writing community.

So I did what a lot of people do: I signed up for an adult education class, specifically a fiction workshop through UCLA extension. To get into the class, I had to submit a portfolio of short stories, which was slightly daunting because I had recently been simultaneously rejected by ten MFA programs.

Anyway, I got in. And what I got was so much better than any MFA program could offer, because I got Lou Mathews as a teacher. The first thing Lou wrote to me was this:

“You only made one mistake on your application. You addressed me as Professor Mathews.”

He was right. “Professor” would have been the wrong word for Lou Mathews. He’s a first name kind of guy, as generous with his time, wisdom, and spirit as anybody I’ve ever met. His family has become part of mine, and what I’ve learned from him — primarily how to not just put stuff down, but to actually tell stories — has made me a far better writer, though even that is oversimplifying. It’s safe to say that my book would have been far more boring without him, and it’s safe to say that this newsletter would too. 

In addition to all that, Lou is a beautiful writer himself who chronicles the weirdos and working folks of LA as lovingly and honestly as anyone ever has. This makes sense, because Lou is one of those people. Before he became a writer and a teacher, he was a mechanic and a street racer. His first book, LA Breakdown, is set in that world. His second, Shaky Town, was just published last month. You should really, really check it out. I implore you.

In honor of Shaky Town, we’re handing the bulk of this week’s newsletter over to Lou. Here’s an excerpt from an essay of his on street racing originally published in the lit journal Black Clock, followed by a short Q&A with the man himself. 

From “Racing in the Streets” by Lou Mathews

In 1965 and part of 1966 I made a good portion of my income on the streets of Los Angeles. Sometimes from straight-up racing but mainly from betting on illegal street-racing. It was a dangerous sport. I saw two engines explode, piston rods punching through the side of the block from detonation because the drivers had loaded their tanks with nitromethane fuel. I saw three cars burn to the ground. I probably saw somebody die. We were running ninety the other way when a car rolled on a back street in Pacoima to avoid a roadblock and the cops. 

At that moment in California Car Culture, street-racing was a 24/7 operation. There were more than forty drive-ins across the Los Angeles basin, twelve legal dragstrips. Even 104-octane White Pump Chevron gasoline was only 25.9 cents a gallon. You could cruise sixty miles in a night for about a buck. The cars were overpowered, underbraked, and handled curves about as well as a coffin on a 2x4 skateboard.

My street-racing mentor, a term he would sneer at, was a guy named Charlie Cooney. He was from North Carolina, originally, a tall man when he wasn’t, characteristically, slumped. He was broad, pot-bellied, lazy-looking, except for lively brown eyes and a neat goatee that offset his soft features. Charlie ran a one-man garage on a desolate stretch of San Fernando Road opposite the train yards. It was as close to a shade-tree garage as you could find in an industrial wasteland. He always had three or four cars on jack-stands or cinderblocks, awaiting parts or inspiration. Usually a couple clunkers for sale — AS IS. In back of the quonset hut garage building was a yard where the better cars and parts were kept, enclosed by a chain-link fence and guarded by two Shetland pony-sized German Shepherds. Cooney was a thief and he protected what was his with vigor. 

Out front on the sidewalk was a sandwich-board sign:

Batteries — New or Used

Battery Repair & Reconditioning

Batteries were Cooney’s main thing, the neighborhood depended on him for reliable starting power and his prices were fair to startling, five to ten dollars under Pep Boys or Western Auto for brand new batteries. No one could figure out how he made a profit. 

Cooney had a simple and ingenious supply method. Late nights and early mornings, he would cruise middle-class neighborhoods far from his own. He’d pick any car parked on the street, write down the license number and the address it was parked in front of, jack the hood, and steal the battery. It was simple work, if the terminals were corroded, he’d cut the cables with shears and lift out the assembly. He didn’t care about the condition of the battery. He brought them back, sometimes ten a night, to his shop, where he would wash them down with baking soda, flush them, add new battery acid, recharge them, and wait a week or so. He would retrace his route, assured that each car would have a new battery. He’d pull the new battery out, put the reconditioned battery in and drive off with the new inventory. He assumed that most car owners never knew about the switch. No reason to lift the hood if the car started. 

My high school, Peter Noster, was a couple miles from his shop. I met Cooney delivering parts for a local NAPA auto parts store and saw him nightly at the local drive-in, Van De Kamp’s, which was Street-Race central. I was an agreeable young fool, willing to run errands, and I was always there, hanging out. Cooney decided he liked me or that I could be useful and took me in hand.

Cooney had four loves: Olympia beer, Lucky Strike cigarettes, the chile verde burritos at Lupitas down the block from his garage, and street racing.

He taught me about the world of street racing. There wasn’t an ounce of romance in his soul, street racing was his livelihood. His scams and weekly work were only the capital he needed to bet. He taught me how to scout, how to handicap, how to bet. 

Cooney had figured out, early on, that in a completely unregulated system, which Street Racing was at that time, a man with knowledge had an extreme advantage. He was the guy who waited at the finish line with a stopwatch hidden in his hand which was buried in a pocket. Until he taught me, I was one of the mob at the starting line, which was always more exciting. 

Drag racing, at a strip or on the street, is simple. Two cars line up side by side and race, straight ahead for a measured quarter-mile. At the dragstrip, each car is measured and delivered time-slips in 1/100th second increments. On the street, all you got was a blinking flashlight for the winning lane. 

Cooney measured and codified and when, by his chart, he had a thirteen-second Chevy up against a fourteen-second Ford, he would get down a bet. Or I would, once Cooney got too widely known. He taught me handicapping. He taught me never to bet on a good car with a bad driver. Most of all he taught me restraint, an unusual choice for a nineteen-year-old. He taught me to wait for the odds to come to me. 

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A Brief Conversation With Lou

Eric: I want to talk about writing and street racing. 

Lou (uninterrupted):  The thing was, you could actually make a living on the street if you were smart. I had a 14 second car, a 55 Chevy with a built 283 and it would run high fourteens about 95, 96 miles an hour for a quarter mile drag, which was respectable back in the day. But, it didn't look that great and it was considered a sleeper because you couldn't look at it aside from the cheater slicks, you couldn't really tell, you know, what the car was built for. So I got a lot of races against people who sort of underrated it. But the main thing was betting.

The other thing I learned in that scene is that the guys who were the real heroes basically couldn't tell their own stories. The whole point about writing is it's the kids on the fringe. It's the kids who are the observers who really get the story — who will get the story right. Because you're not really part of the scene. You're just one of the squirrels who is seeing what's going down. And so you have to use your imagination quite a lot more. 

You can fill in the gaps because you know there are gaps because you know you don't know, the inside story, but, uh, uh, but that was the first time I realized that, you know, being an observer, being an outsider was actually kind of an advantage when it came time to write.

Eric: You talked in classes about the notion of expertise and the importance of, when you’re entering a fictional world, really knowing what you’re talking about because people can tell when a writer is bullshitting. I’ve found that that phenomenon is also true out in the world: you can only fake it for so long about something.

Was that an experience you had in street racing? Where phonies were easy to sniff out? 

Lou: You had to know shit, otherwise you would get screwed. In other words, you would pop the hood on a car and, you know, the guy would be claiming that he was running a 265, at which point you would look at the block pad and see if they had a C-code: that was a 265. If it was a 283, it had a different number. If it had a double hump on the head casting you were looking at a 327 with fuelie heads. That was the kind of stuff you had to know, because you're talking about a difference in horsepower. It's only 20 cubic inches, but you're talking about a difference in horsepower of about 40 horses. In other words, you had to have a certain level of expertise to compete. 

Eric: Do you consider street racing a sport or something else?

Lou: It's not a sport, it's a way of life. It’s an outlaw sport. Do you know Barnaby Conrad? He  was a total dick. He was a toreador, a huge Hemingway follower. And he had this quote that was often attributed to Hemingway, which is he said the only true sports were mountain climbing, boxing, and auto racing, because it’s possible to die participating in them, which is total bullshit. He said everything else is a game. So you could say street racing is a sport in that sense, because you could die. 

I probably saw somebody die. Roll over at ninety and go up in flames. I came pretty close myself. This is the shit you do when you're 18, 19, you know? It's just amazing that so many of us survived. Because the cars themselves, the horsepower was impressive, but breaking and handling on those cars was terrible. At one point I talked in that essay about trying to race on Forest Lawn Drive. That was suicidal. It was completely stupid.

Eric: Fitting place to die I guess.

(Editor’s note: Forest Lawn Drive is named for the massive cemetery that sits on the hillside above it.) 

Lou: With all the dead looking down on you.

Thank you for reading Sports Stories. Buy Shaky Town, support independent writers and publishers. Don’t drive too fast. We’ll see you next week.

If you’re a longtime reader, or just enjoy this post, please consider doing us the favor of sharing Sports Stories. You are the reason we do this, and also happen to be our best (and only) marketing system.

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In The Great Gatsby, the first time the narrator Nick Carraway meets Jay Gatsby, they talk about their experiences in World War I, and reminisce on “wet, grey, little villages in France.” Then Gatsby invites Nick for a ride on his hydroplane. 

The Great Gatsby is, among other things, a book about money. And what better symbol could there be of high society luxury and sporting fun in 1920s Long Island than a boat so fast that it literally flies atop the water? 

Joe Carstairs did not live in Long Island at the time, but she came from money (a lot of money), and it was money that allowed her to become a famous boat racer; money that enabled her to become known as “the fastest woman on water.” 

Carstairs had that money, but not much else as a child. She was born Marian Barbara Carstairs in London, England in 1900. Her mother was an American oil heiress who battled addictions to drug and alcohol and chewed through one husband after another: first there was Carstairs’ father, a Scottish military officer, then there was another officer named Francis Francis, then a French count, and finally, French-Russian physician named Serge Voronoff who became infamous for grafting testicular tissue from monkeys and apes onto men as a form of “rejuvenation.” 

But Carstairs didn’t personally deal much with these husbands. Nor did she deal much with her mother for that matter. To the old folks in her life, she was an odd and independent and recalcitrant child. So the old folks sent her out of sight to boarding school in Connecticut when she was just 11 years old. High society didn’t know how to cope with a little girl like her, because she wasn’t really a little girl at all. 

The best source of information on Joe Carstairs is Kate Summerscale’s biography The Queen of Whale Cay. And I think it’s worth going ahead and quoting from the very first page of that book, because it is insightful and beautifully written. 

There you have it. Joe Carstairs left names like Marian and Barbara behind. She dressed as a man and got cool tattoos and openly had affairs with women. During World War I, she drove an ambulance in France for the Red Cross. After the war, her mother died, and Carstairs briefly married a childhood friend in order to access some of her inheritance. She used it to open a limo company called X-Garage with all-female drivers and mechanics. A few years after that came an even larger inheritance upon the death of her grandmother. This was when Carstairs bought her first boat.

Carstairs spent the late 1920s building increasingly fast hydroplanes, and winning many races. She was addicted to the sensation of speed, and she said she raced boats in part because she felt that they felt faster than cars or airplanes. She was also a true eccentric. A girlfriend gifted her a small doll, and Carstairs became famously attached to it, giving it the odd name of Lord Tod Wadley, buying it custom tailored clothes, and carrying it with her everywhere for the rest of her life. As a tribute to her late mother, Carstairs named many of her boats Estelle -- only to later learn that her mother went by Evelyn.

For Jay Gatsby, the hydroplane was a status symbol. For Joe Carstairs, it was life itself. Of course, unlike Jay Gatsby, Joe Carstairs was born rich. And she was not prone to worrying about status or symbols or anything like that anyway. She raced until she had enough of racing. Then she bought an island and decided to build an empire. 

In 1934, Carstairs left racing behind and moved to Whale Cay, a 700-acre island in the Bahamas. She would spend the next 40 years living there as a sort of imperialist queen alongside her doll, Lord Tod Wadley. She built a great mansion and a church and a lighthouse and maintained an agricultural operation with hundreds of employees who she treated like subjects. She entertained famous guests and countless lovers. (Sometimes, like in the case of the actress Marlene Deitrich, these were one and the same). 

This isn’t to say that Carstairs stopped boating. She continued to love the water. Once during World War II, she even rescued a crew of American merchant marines whose ship had been sunk by a a German U-Boat in the Caribbean.

Carstairs left Whale Cay in the 1970s for South Florida, where she lived out the rest of her life in relative quiet. She died in 1993, and was cremated alongside Lord Tod Wadley. Both of their ashes were buried in Long Island.

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For more on Carstairs, the real definitive source is the aforementioned book The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale. Cool fact about that book: it grew out of Summerscale’s work as an obituary editor at The Telegraph. When Carstairs died, one of her goddaughters sent Summerscale information about her life — and after writing the obit, Summerscale decided there might be more there, so she started digging. It’s a good thing she did.

Whale Cay itself was put on the market recently for $20 million. Here’s a story about it from Forbes.

Finally, here’s an account about the merchant marine rescue Carstairs made during WWII from a website about shark attacks. (One of the survivors of the U-Boat attack was indeed bitten by a shark in the arm, and later died of the ensuing infection.) This contains some good primary sources too.

Doc Voronoff

Earlier we mentioned that Carstairs’ mother Evelyn was married for a time to a Doctor Serge Voronoff. While he isn’t a “sports story” technically speaking, Voronoff was a fascinating dude. His insane medical practices (once again, that’s grafting bits of ape testicles into human scrotums) were a huge sensation in the 1920s. Supposedly, the ape specimen would fuse with the human tissue around it and rejuvenate old men. Thousands of men got this surgery, and Voronoff even raised his own monkeys for the express purpose. It’s absurd and also horrifying to think about. Which is perhaps why the poet ee cummings wrote about it in a poem:

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

Next week, the NFL season begins. Millions of us begin the annual Sunday tradition of sinking into couches, eating snacks, drinking beer, and numbing ourselves with controlled violence, frequent commercial breaks, and increasingly accessible low-stakes gambling. 

Only this time, we get one more week of football. The NFL is stretching itself out: instead of the 16-game schedule we’ve come to know and love, there will be 17 regular season Sundays this year. This might be nice for fans, but it’s not easy on the players who now have to gear up for an additional week of practice; put their bodies at risk one more time; accumulate however many more subconcussive blows to the head. 

Many NFL players opposed the addition of a 17th game to the schedule, reasonably citing concerns about their health and safety. The season was brutal enough as it was. But at least players will be compensated for the extra work with an additional, pro-rated game check. This was part of the deal negotiated by the NFL Players Association. It might not be a great deal for the players, but it’s certainly better than what could have been; and it’s better in part because of Roy Zimmerman. 

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Henry LeRoy Zimmerman Jr. was born on a farm in Tonganoxie, Kansas in 1918, and lived there until 1930 when the property was destroyed in a dust storm. The Zimmerman family joined the ongoing migration from the plains to California and settled in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Meanwhile, Roy became a star athlete: first at Monrovia High School, then San Jose State University. 

After college, he signed with Washington, where he spent three somewhat miserable years as a backup to the legendary Sammy Baugh. According to Matthew Algeo’s book Last Team Standing, Zimmerman was not thrilled with being a backup, nor with the methods of his team’s owner George Preston Marshall. (Marshall was the man who gave the team its racist former nickname; he was also a committed segregationist who only signed a Black player in 1962 after the federal government threatened to kick him out of his stadium). 

Anyway, Zimmerman did not care for Marshall. This all came to a head in the summer of 1943 when Marshall scheduled the team to play an additional unpaid exhibition game against a squad of collegiate all stars in Chicago. Zimmerman refused to suit up for the exhibition. He thought that if the owner was going to schedule additional exhibitions, the team ought to be compensated. 

The very next day, Marshall traded Zimmerman to the Philadelphia Eagles. If you are a longtime subscriber to this newsletter you might remember what happened next: for the 1943 season, due to war-related player shortages, the Eagles combined with the Pittsburgh Steelers to form a team known as the Steagles. Roy Zimmerman was their quarterback. In the ensuing years, after the Steagles disbanded, he would go on to have success with the regular Eagles, the Detroit Lions, and the Boston Yanks. (Once again, I point to Algeo’s book Last Team Standing as a great read on the Steagles.) 

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After his retirement from football, Roy Zimmerman went back to California, where he spent his life coaching various high school sports, and pitching for professional fastpitch softball teams, in particular the Fresno Hoak Packers and the Long Beach Nitehawks. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest softball pitchers of all time. Maybe not Eddie Feigner level -- but close. 

Roy Zimmerman died in 1997. He left behind 57 great grandchildren. 

Happy Labor Day. Shanah tovah. Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

Sometimes this newsletter is a place to dig up obscure tales and explore the tragic and raw elements of how sports and society intersect. Other times it’s a place to simply celebrate a unique and beloved athlete like Lee Trevino.

He’s one of the great golfers of all time. But when I think about Lee Trevino, the first thing that comes to my mind is his cameo in Happy Gilmore. He shows up intermittently throughout the movie, shaking his head every time Adam Sandler does something inappropriate. In this way, he’s kind of like a stand in for the disappointed golf establishment. 

But what I didn’t realize as a kid watching the movie was that Lee Trevino was how ironic that bit part was: Trevino only utters one line in Happy Gilmore (“Grizzly Adams did have a beard”), and is otherwise silent. But the real Lee Trevino was famously chatty on the golf course -- sometimes to the irritation of more turgid golf types in his orbit. And his background is anything but the classic tale of country club insularity and privilege. 

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Lee Trevino was raised by his mother Juanita in the Texas cotton fields. His family had no money, no electricity, and certainly no history of golfing. But he got a job as a caddy and taught himself to play: first as a teenager, then in the Marine Corps, then when he got home. He worked construction building the back nine of a golf course in Dallas, and in his off hours, he would hit balls on the front nine when nobody was around.

This was how Lee Trevino made himself great. He started hustling players around Dallas and making good money. Then he entered local tournaments and started winning them. Soon enough, he had his PGA card.Soon enough, he was winning the U.S. Open. 

Trevino had a funky swing and a unique style on the course. He was hunched over and bent his knees and he hit every single ball perfectly. (I am not a golfer, but I have now fallen halfway down the rabbit hole of swing analysis videos on YouTube, and boy is it deep.) There was nobody who looked, talked, or acted like Trevino. He went by Super Mex. 

To understand just how much of a shock Trevino was to the system of golf, here’s an excerpt from a Sports Illustrated story by Dan Jenkins, who is widely considered to be the greatest golf writer of all time. This was published after Trevino came out of nowhere to win that first U.S. Open in 1968. It reads like it: 

Super Mex is what he called himself. Super Mexkin. And there he was out there in the midst of all of that U.S. Open dignity with his spread-out caddie-hustler stance and his short, choppy public-course swing, a stumpy little guy, tan as the inside of a tamale, pretty lippy for a nobody, and, yeah, wearing those red socks. And here were all of these yells coming from the trees and the knolls of the Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, coming from all of the other Lee Trevinos of the world. "Whip the gringo," hollered Lee's Fleas, a band of instant Mexicans enthusiastic enough to rival anybody's army, some of them $30-a-week guys like Trevino himself was just a little more than a year ago.

Despite the blatant and casual racism on display, Dan Jenkins loved Trevino. He said he was the best thing to happen to golf since Arnold Palmer. Trevino kept winning. He won the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship two times apiece. He never won the Master’s, but that might be because he spent his prime avoiding the tournament -- he felt uncomfortable amongst all the stuffy old people. During the 1971, U.S. Open playoff, Trevino pulled a rubber snake out of his bag and threw it at Jack Nicklaus. Then he won.

In 1975, Trevino was playing in the Western Open in Illinois when he was struck by lightning. He survived, but he would never completely recover from the back injuries he suffered. Still, over the course of years, he found his game again. Trevino won his final major, the PGA Championship, in 1984. He was 44 years old.

Here’s a delightful video of Trevino hitting a hole in one in a televised skins game a couple years after that (made even more delightful by the fact that it is broadcast by Vin Scully): 

By the 1990s, Trevino had transcended golf and fully become a pop culture phenomenon. He had a Nintendo game called Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf. Why was it called fighting golf? I have no idea. There was no fighting. Anyway, you couldn’t play as Lee Trevino, but there was a character named Super Mex. 

It was also famously parodied on the Simpsons, as Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge:

Then, finally, there was Happy Gilmore -- a movie Trevino said he would not have appeared in had he known that it would feature such bad language. 

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

Last month in Tokyo, weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz became the first Filipino to win an Olympic gold medal. She also set multiple Olympic records despite having spent more than a year stranded in Malaysia leading up to the games due to Covid travel restrictions. It was a remarkable achievement for Diaz, who is also a member of the Philippines Air Force, and big news for a country that has been searching for gold since it began competing regularly in the summer games in 1924.

But it’s not as if the Philippines have been bereft of Olympic heroes. The country’s first medalist was a swimmer named Teófilo Yldefonso, who rose to fame in the 1920s and redefined the breaststroke as it was performed around the world. 

Yldefonso was born in a town called Piddig in the province of Ilocos Norte on the island of Luzon in 1903. He lost both of his parents when he was very young, and he and his siblings raised themselves around the banks of the Guisit River. It was here that as a boy, Yldefonso learned to swim. 

When he was 18, Yldefonso enlisted in the Philippine Scouts, a military regiment under the control of the U.S. Army. This was how he got involved in competitive swimming. He was not a tall and powerful athlete. He did not have the kind of body that we now associate with great swimmers. But he was lithe and natural in the water and almost floated on top of it. 

Instead of diving under and then rising back up, Yldefonso’s breaststroke technique saw him remaining high in the water, practically skimming across the surface. It was against the conventional wisdom and unlike anything other swimmers were doing -- but it worked so well that it caught on with many of his competitors.

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He racked up victories in national meets and across Asia. In 1928, he brought back his country’s first Olympic medal from Amsterdam, a bronze in the 200M breaststroke. Then in 1932 in Los Angeles, he again won bronze in the same event. He earned the nickname The Ilocano Shark. 

Yldefonso married and had six children. He also continued to compete into his mid-30s. He qualified for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but for the first time, failed to win a medal. 

When World War II reached the Philippines, Yldefonso re-enlisted in the military. He rose to the rank of Lieutenant during the war, and was present at the surrender of Bataan to the Japanese in 1942. Yldefonso managed to survive the ensuing death march from Bataan to Capas.. 

According to Swimming World Magazine, one of Yldefonso’s friendly rivals, a great Japanese swimmer named Yoshi Tsuruta, who had also become a military officer, had heard about his capture and attempted to write him orders of release. But Yldefonso died in the arms of his younger brother in a prison camp at Capas. His remains were never found.

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Related Reading:

I liked this story on Yldefonso’s life from Manila Bulletin: straightforward and well-written. 

Here’s a video of Yldefonso in the pool at the 1936 games:

Hidilyn Diaz, in addition to winning the Philippines’ first gold medal, has also been embroiled in a somewhat convoluted political controversy involving the country’s authoritarian-minded president Rodrigo Duterte. Her name appeared on a list of celebrities seeking to undermine Duterte’s power and remove him from office, leading him to starve her of government support in the runup to the games. It also led to Diaz and her family receiving death threats. 

However, it by all means appears that the list was fabricated -- perhaps by Duterte himself to drum up anger amongst his followers. After Diaz won gold, Duterte publicly congratulated her, and took the somewhat rare step of apologizing. Read more on that here.

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.

Many of you are probably aware of the 1977 documentary Pumping Iron, which made stars out of bodybuilders Arnold Schwarzenneger and Lou Ferigno as they battled for the title of Mr. Olympia. Or perhaps you have at least come across the infamous scene in which the future governor gleefully discusses what specifically lifting weights feels like.  

I am willing to bet that less of our readers are familiar with its sequel, Pumping Iron 2: The Women. Produced, written, and directed by some of the same folks who made the original, Pumping Iron 2 is a weird time capsule into the 1980s and also a surprisingly direct (if also dated, clumsy, and limited) exploration of gender. It’s an interesting movie and certainly a sports story worth thinking about. 

The documentary tells the tale of the 1983 Caesars World Cup -- a bodybuilding event that was specifically invented for the sake of the movie. (This also pushes us to consider where the line falls on what exactly we might call a documentary; or, if you want to go even further, the artifice that is inherent in all the sporting events we care about so deeply). Regardless, the characters are real and the competition is real to the women competing in it. 

We meet various bodybuilders as they prepare for the event, visiting them at home, in the gym, etc. There are lots of closeups of muscles and bodies, lots of shots of the neon lights of Las Vegas. There are nice little scenes showing the athletes in their daily lives, with their families. But the film is primarily interested in addressing a fundamental question about the nature of bodies themselves, and how we judge them.

How does it address this question? Well, the filmmakers bring in a ringer.  In addition to the typical members of the bodybuilding circuit, the Caesars World Cup will also feature a charming Australian weightlifter named Bev Francis. Francis is stronger and more muscular than her competitors. But she also lacks the traditionally “feminine” qualities that judges in bodybuilding competitions look for. 

The question then becomes: what is the purpose of a bodybuilding contest. Is it about having the most muscles? Is it about practical strength? Is it a purely aesthetic exercise? And if so -- what is the basis for these aesthetics? 

In the narrative, Francis is pitted in particular against the “feminine” Rachel McLish. McLish stands in for what the judging establishment expects from its competitors. Francis challenges their preconceived notions and expectations. It’s worth stating here that I am discussing femininity in the terms of the documentary, which are pretty binary and unimaginative. It’s also worth noting that both women come off in the movie as extremely likeable, self-aware athletes. They are reflective, contemplative, and also funny. So is Carla Dunlap, a former synchronized swimmer turned bodybuilder who tells her family early in the movie that she is really all about one thing: winning. 

The problem is that winning a competition is hard when the rules are up in the air even as it is going on. There is a level of subjectivity, of course, to all judged sporting events: figure skating, gymnastics, bodybuilding. But in Pumping Iron 2, that subjectivity becomes a pivotal plot point. 

Right before the competition in Vegas, officials meet to discuss the criteria by which the women will be judged. Nearly all of these officials, it should be noted, are men. 

“We hope that this evening, we can clear up the definite meaning...of the word femininity,” says the judge who appears to be in charge. This is a pretty heady task for a panel of bodybuilding judges in a competition that was invented for the sake of a movie sequel. Needless to say, no consensus is reached, and at least in the movie, no women’s voices are heard. 

This main judge fellow, who is not named, argues that if women become too muscular they lose their femininity. His opponents argue that like anything else, femininity is in the eye of the beholder, and besides that, femininity is not the point of a bodybuilding competition. The point of a bodybuilding competition is muscles. 

“It’s as though we told women skiers they can only ski so fast,” one says. 

When the competition begins, it is clear that Francis, the most muscular woman in the group, has the crowd behind her. She emerges on a dark stage, and poses to a synth version of the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s dramatic, ridiculous, and deeply entertaining. The people go wild. The entire competition, as it is filmed, has a surreal quality to it. One woman, Tina Plackinger, literally moonwalks between poses.

In between rounds of poses, Bev Francis and wonders about the nature of the sport, and the whims of judges, and the point of all this. “You’re not allowed to have muscles, you’re a girl,” she says in the voice of a judge. Francis is a spectacular athlete. She has proven that with enough willpower and discipline a human body can do just about anything. 

Is bodybuilding a more honest sport for the fact that it is really just about judging looks? After all, aren’t appearances the reason so many people spend so much time in the gym? Or is it just an exercise in our collective vanity? A reminder of our collective narrowmindedness and the limits of conventional thinking about gender? Bev Francis had already achieved greatness in powerlifting. She had already demonstrated her functional strength. Why stoop to being judged by strangers for the mere appearance of said strength? Especially strangers who are so bound by absurd and indefensible and ultimately empty notions of what “beauty” is. 

When the finalists are announced by emcee George Plimpton (yes, the writer and founder of The Paris Review), the moonwalking Tina Packlinger is among them. So are Rachel McLish and Carla Dunlap. But not Bev Francis. It is Dunlap who is announced as the winner. Bev Francis, it turns out, finished in eighth place. 

After the competition, the women all eat ice cream together backstage to celebrate being done with training -- done with fasting and being leered at and putting themselves through hell. 

But Bev Francis gets the last word. 

We see her back in her hotel room, discussing the loss with her trainers. Finally, the camera cuts to one of the trainers -- a bodybuilder himself. 

“What did Tina Plackinger have over Bev? What did Carla have over Bev?”

Explain it to me. Explain it to me. Explain it to me.” 

Related Reading

You can watch a low quality stream of Pumping Iron 2: The Women here. 

I also thought this writeup on the film by Peter McGough of the website Muscular Development was really good. He explores the extent to which the competition is contrived and also points out that Francis and McLish were actually close friends, despite the way the film tried to portray them as rivals. 

Here are a couple reviews of the film by Roger Ebert, who liked it, and Janis Maslin, who did not.

Finally, these questions are still lingering in the bodybuilding world. When I worked at Vice we published a feature by Ian Frisch on the pressure put on women bodybuilders to get breast implants. 

Thanks for reading Sports Stories. We’ll see you next week.