Formed in 1904, the Alpha Physical Culture Club of Harlem was America's first African American athletic club. Conrad Norman, its Jamaican-born founder, hoped to address rampant lung disease among blacks living in New York City's overcrowded tenements by providing proper exercise facilities they could use without bias. The club's basketball team, the Alpha Big Five, became nationally famous during the 1910s while sticking faithfully to the strictest amateur ideals. But the times were changi...

The Black Fives is a groundbreaking, timely history of the largely unknown early days of Black basketball, bringing to life the trailblazing players, teams, and impresarios who pioneered the sport.“For a game that has meant so much to the world, Claude Johnson somehow presents a definitive account for a part of basketball’s history that for so long was kept away from us. Claude is a superhero storyteller, and this ...

A groundbreaking history of Black basketballAfrican Americans were making moves in basketball generations before the rise of the NBA. Their pioneering efforts helped popularize the sport in big cities and small towns alike and shaped the game we know and love today. From theinvention of the game in 1891 to the racial integration of all-White professional leagues in the 1950s, dozens of teams—then often called “fives”—of African American players were founded and flourished. T...

From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way."Intriguing...thought provoking...delightful." --The Washington PostNo announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant...

If baseball is America's national religion, then the Hall of Fame is its High Church. Being named among its 286 inductees makes you the closest thing our country has to an undisputed hero - even a secular saint. But the men in the Hall of Fame are no angels. Among their number are gamblers, drunks, race-baiters, at least one murderer, and perhaps the greatest collection of bona fide characters ever to be dignified by an honor of any kind.This is the book the Hall of Fame deserves. ...

In 2008, the Vancouver Canucks were Team Modern, revolutionizing the NHL under their new GM, former player agent Mike Gillis. Cool, calculating, and unsparing with the media, the onetime number one draft pick of the old Colorado Rockies swept away the tangled psychological past of the Canucks with bold innovation, remodeling Vancouver as a destination city for NHL star players. To do so, he built the Canucks from a non-playoff team in 2008 to the best in hockey from 2010-2012. He modernize...

John William Ferrell was born and raised in a sleepy suburb of Irvine, California. Although the eldest son of Roy Lee Farrell Jr., keyboardist for The Righteous Brothers, Ferrell describes his childhood as painfully normal.After graduating from the University of Southern California with a degree in Sports Information, Ferrell soon realized that his true calling was doing what he loved: making others laugh. He then moved to Los Angeles in order to pursue a career in comedy.F...

In the mid-1970s, the city of Boston entered a period of upheaval on both its historic cobblestone streets and its legendary parquet basketball court. The Boston Celtics' long dominance of the NBA came to an abrupt end, and the city's image as a hub of social justice was shaken to its core. When the federal courts declared, in 1974, that the city was in violation of school desegregation rulings and would need to institute a busing program, Boston became deeply polarized. Then, just as the ...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “An explosive and absorbing discussion of race, politics, and the history of American sports.”—EbonyFrom Jackie Robinson to Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe, African American athletes have been at the center of modern culture, their on-the-field heroics admired and stratospheric earnings envied. But for all their money, fame, and achievement, says New York Times columnist William C. Rhoden, black athletes still fin...

The history of basketball contains all the drama inherent in America's long struggle with racial intolerance and quest for equality. In ten focused chapters that highlight characters both famous (Bill Russell, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird) and more obscure (John McLendon, Earl Lloyd, Holcombe Rucker), this book explores how what's happened on the basketball court has mirrored race relations in the United States—and often preceded changes off of it.

Considers the misappropriation of African American popular culture through various genres, largely Hip Hop, to argue that while such cultural creations have the potential to be healing agents, they are still exploited -often with the complicity of African Americans- for commercial purposes and to maintain white ruling class hegemony.

College football fans need no introduction to Bud Wilkinson, but few of them know the great University of Oklahoma football coach as a devoted father. In Dear Jay, Love Bud, Jay Wilkinson, Bud’s younger son, shares forty-seven letters his father wrote to him while he was in college and graduate school. Spanning the early to mid-1960s, these letters reveal Bud’s deep love for his son, as well as the philosophy and values that led to his remarkable success in sports and in life....