Sports books review, late summer edition
(To make it easy for you to buy any of these books if you are interested, I made each image linked to buying the book right on amazon.com or bookshop.org. I do get a commission if you use the links in this post.)
High Contrast: A Story of Basketball, Race and Politics in Oregon 1972
By Andrew Kaza
Nestucca Spit Press
Andrew Kaza tells the story of one of the more interesting Oregon State basketball championships ever — the Jefferson Democrats vs. the Baker Bulldogs in 1972.
Jefferson was urban and black. Baker was country and white. It was a clash of cultures, lifestyles and ideologies, covered appropriately by the author, who did not watch the Demos-Dogs final but had a unique connection. Two years earlier, at the age of 10, Kaza was one of nine white children to take part in a voluntary busing program that sent them from the suburbs to Martin Luther King Elementary, a feeder school for Jeff. Though he was to graduate from Sunset High, Kaza maintained an avid interest in Jeff sports, especially basketball.
It was a different world then in Oregon. The Trail Blazers had just begun two years earlier, and there was still wide-spread interest in high school sports. The week-long Class 3A Basketball Tournament was a spectacle, a happening. The Jefferson-Baker final in 1972 drew a crowd of 13,395, which serves as the largest ever to watch a game at Memorial Coliseum. (The Blazers were capped at 12,666 and, in later years, 12,884). Today, 6A title games are lucky to sell out Chiles Center at 4,850.
The early ‘70s were an era of great societal change in America, and the author fleshes out the 300-page book with plenty of historical perspective, both national and local. Race is a central theme. Kaza looks at the era through the lens of social injustice, a hot topic of the day as the country moved past the turbulent ‘60s.
The author covers the previous year’s state tournament, mentioning that Corvallis High didn’t make it into the field of 16. That was of particular interest to me. I graduated from Corvallis in 1971 and was a senior on the basketball team that season. The year before, the Spartans had gone 26-0 to claim the state championship, the first school ever to go through a season unbeaten. That team featured 11 seniors and junior All-Stater Dean Roberts, who would be our leader and best player on a 1970-71 CHS team that also had 11 seniors.
Late in the season, the OSAA declared one of our players — sixth man Jerry Johnson — ineligible. Johnson was an Alaska native and pitcher who moved to Corvallis so he could play spring baseball and get an opportunity to pitch before pro scouts. During that school year, he lived with the family of one of our athletes, Gary Beck, whose mother served as Jerry’s legal guardian. The rules at the time, however, specified that for an athlete to be eligible for participation, the guardian had to move into the state with him/her. That had slipped past our athletic director, and once it was discovered by the OSAA, the spit hit the fan.
Corvallis was 7-2 in Valley League play at the time and had to forfeit all the victories. Johnson sat out the final six league games, during which the Spartans went unbeaten, but Albany and South Salem advanced to state.
As you might expect, the players were crushed to be denied an opportunity to play in what was then considered the most prestigious prep sports event in Oregon. Our first-round matchup would have been with top-ranked Benson, led by sophomore Richard Washington. The Techmen went on to win the state title, but nobody could have convinced us that we wouldn’t have knocked them off. That was the year the Spartans won state titles in football and baseball. To a man, we believe we’d have made it a trifecta had we gotten our deserved shot in hoops.
I enjoyed reading Kaza’s account of the entire 1971-72 season. Jefferson lost only one game and was ranked No. 1 or 2 all season. Baker, led by 6-7 senior Darryl Ross, started slowly but finished strong to win the Intermountain Conference crown and then advance to the championship game. The author uses accounts through the season from many of my Portland newspaper contemporaries, including Ed Hunt, Lynn Mucken, Ron Olson, Norm Maves and Paul Daquilante.
Kaza gets plenty of quotage from the Jefferson coach of the time, Jack Bertell, and the Demos’ point guard, Tony Hopson. From the other side, he interviewed point guard Dick Sheehy and a couple of other Baker players. But the book was lacking perspective from Jefferson’s other living starters, Charles Channel, Carl Bird and Ray Leary. (Ross and the Bulldogs’ coach, Gary Hammond, are deceased.)
If you are in your 60s or older and grew up in the state, this book will bring back plenty of memories. If not, it offers a look at how things once were in Oregon, but will never be again.
► ◄
Promoter Ain’t a Dirty Word
By Harry Glickman
Timber Press
This 186-page book was published in 1978, the year after the Trail Blazers won their only NBA championship. Glickman was Portland’s general manager and center of the team’s universe.
I’m pretty sure Harry got the job done without a ghost writer. After all, his goal in life as a teenager was to become a sportswriter.
I read this book shortly after it came out but had totally forgotten its content. My wife recently found a copy of it and bought it for me. It’s semi-autobiographical, covering the first 54 years of Glickman’s life (he died in 2020 at 96).
Glickman spent the first two decades of his career promoting sporting events in Portland, including boxing and NFL, NBA and NHL exhibitions. Harry was old-school to the nth degree. Contracts were only a necessary evil. A handshake agreement worked if there was mutual trust between parties.
Then Glickman became a procurer of sports franchises for the City of Roses.
In 1960, the year Memorial Coliseum opened, the Portland Buckaroos began play in the Western Hockey League. Over the next 15 years, with Glickman as GM, the Buckaroos won three Lester Patrick Cup titles and more games than any team in professional hockey. Ten years later, the Blazers were born. It took them seven years to win a title — not bad at all, actually.
Glickman provides a behind-the-scenes look at what an NBA front office was back then. He tells the story about gathering ownership that ponied up $3.7 million — little more than a 10-year veteran’s minimum salary today — for the Blazers’ franchise fee in 1970. It was a mom-and-pop organization through the first decade under owner Larry Weinberg in decidedly more simple times.
This is a great history of the early days of the Blazers. The reader gets Harry’s take on Geoff Petrie and Sidney Wicks and Bill Walton and Jack Scott and Lenny Wilkens and Jack Ramsay and the decision to trade Moses Malone before he had played a regular-season game.
The last 30 pages illustrate what a different world pro sports was then. Glickman didn’t allow home games to be televised because it would hurt the live gate. Now the television package is a much bigger item and all games are carried live. Glickman tells the story of national TV wanting to start Game 6 of the 1977 Finals at 11 a.m. He held firm that it wasn’t going to happen — it started at 12:30 p.m. instead. And CBS cut away immediately after game’s end to the Kemper Open. “The final insult,” Harry called it.
“But regardless of what television holds in store for the future,” Glickman writes, “to me there is nothing like being there.”
I’d like to think that’s one thing that hasn’t changed.
Glickman also weighs in on the advent of free agency in pro sports. Baseball’s “Reserve Clause” had just been struck down, opening the door for players to become free agents. In the NBA, the “Compensation Rule” for free agents was being phased out, replaced by “the right of first refusal” — the forerunner to what now stands with restricted free agency. Glickman didn’t like it at all.
“This will present an enormous problem to a club such as Portland,” he writes. “Though we have been successful in filling our building to capacity, we still have to play against teams like the Knicks and Lakers with our capacity of 12,666 against their capacity of 20,000 and the corresponding potential of gate receipts.”
Glickman also compares the Blazers’ local TV and radio package to that of other markets.
“They start the season a million dollars ahead of us before we throw up the first ball,” Glickman writes. “It is to be hoped that common sense will prevail and that the larger cities and wealthy owners will not run the smaller cities with less wealthy owners out of business when the new ‘right of first refusal’ comes into operation.”
Fortunately, that didn’t happen. Ironically, Portland became one of the “rich” teams when Paul Allen assumed ownership. That’s covered in another book — one I wrote.
► ◄
By Nicholas Dawidoff
Vintage Books
I finally got around to reading this book, written in 1994, about Moe Berg, a middling catcher who played 15 major league seasons (but only 663 games) from 1923-39. Berg was mostly a backup, known primarily because he was one of the few Jewish players who made it to the majors during his era.
Berg is most well-known for serving as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. He was an introvert who never married or had children, a brilliant, well-educated man with degrees from Princeton and Columbia Law School. In 1929, while playing for the White Sox, he passed the New York bar exam. He never worked as a lawyer, in part because he loved baseball and the lifestyle it afford him. Berg spoke several languages and was a voracious reader of newspapers, regularly reading as many as a dozen a day.
Berg was also a man of scruples. He was a hero to Jewish fans of the day. So enthusiastic were some fans when he played with the White Sox that they wanted to have a “day” for him in 1925 after a teammate, Red Faber, had been so honored by the club. Chisox fans raised a staggering $25,000 for “Berg Day,” only to have Moe turn it down.
“I’ve done nothing to merit it,” Berg said at the time. “And besides, it would be an affront to a great player like Faber.”
The book is extremely well-written and well-researched — there are nearly 50 pages of annotations and a seven-page bibliography. Berg died in 1972, so the author had no opportunity to interview him, or his brother or sister. Berg was an intentionally private person, but Dawidoff’s exhaustive research uncovered a life line that told Berg’s story brilliantly.
Dawidoff spent months at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., tracking Berg’s OSS career through thousands of boxes of records and hundreds of spools of microfilm. Berg also had affiliations with the CIA (the successor to the OSS) and FBI, and Dawidoff used materials from both to craft Berg’s story.
Berg was a so-so hitter (.243 career batting average) but an excellent defensive catcher who wrote a “paper” entitled “Pitchers and Catchers” that was considered a primer on the art of baseball. He was an “eccentric,” Dawidoff writes, yet a willing conversationalist who got along well with people but seemed to have a sad countenance about him. “I don’t ever remember seeing him laughing,” said Ted Williams, a teammate of his with the Red Sox.
Berg was a “charmer with the ladies,” the author writes, but “kept his private life as secret as anything else.” Dawidoff found a photo of a woman Berg dated; on the back he wrote a memo to himself, saying, “Kelly has a beautiful leg, and what a fanny.”
I found it fascinating that, on a tour of American players to Japan in 1934, Berg brought an automatic movie camera. During the trip, he ventured to the bell tower of a hospital in downtown Tokyo and shot four hours of film of the city, shipyards, industrial complexes and military complexes around Tokyo. Berg — who spoke fluent Japanese — also recorded Mount Fuji, some 60 miles away. Once finished, he secreted the camera, climbed down a staircase and departed. Japan and the U.S. were already at odds, and in 1942, as the countries were at war, Berg screened the footage he had shot from Tokyo with intelligence officers of the U.S. military.
Berg was a world traveler, a cheapskate, friendly to many but with no close friends. During his time working as a spy for the U.S. government, he went on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed pharmacists to gather information about the Nazi German nuclear program and the building of an atom bomb. After the War, Berg was awarded the Medal of Freedom, the highest honor given to civilians during wartime, by President Harry Truman. Berg refused it, offering no explanation. Dawidoff speculates it was because he didn’t feel he deserved it.
Today, Berg’s baseball card is the only one on display at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.
To the day he died of an aortic aneurism in 1972, Berg remained a fan of the game of baseball. But he was so much more than that. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys history and reading about someone who was involved in a wealth of interesting activities through a full but somehow unsatisfying life. Moe Berg was truly a unique individual, his life a piece of baseball history that should not be forgotten.
In 2018, the book was turned into a screenplay, and then a movie. Paul Rudd portrays Moe Berg in the movie and you can find where to stream the movie here, including a free option.
► ◄
A Notre Dame Man: The Life, Lore and Runs of Eric Penick
Eric Penick and Stephen Alexander
Unless you’re a long-time fan of the Fighting Irish, Penick’s name is unlikely to ring a bell. He showed speed and brilliance as a running back during his sophomore and junior seasons at Notre Dame, and his 85-yard touchdown run against Southern Cal in 1973 is the stuff of legends. But an injury all but wiped out his senior campaign, and he never played a down in the NFL.
Penick’s life story, however, may be of interest. The Cleveland native, who never knew his birth father until his college years but was raised by a wonderful mother, seemed on a path to a pro football career before an ankle injury suffered during the 1973 Sugar Bowl derailed his dreams. The ankle never fully healed, surgery was ineffective and he was never the same player. “My life went downhill from that moment,” he writes.
After that, he went through three marriages (through which he had eight children), the latter of which lasted 37 years until his wife’s death from lung cancer. Along the way, Penick was incarcerated for 4 1/2 years for what he vaguely describes as “legal repercussions” after trying to help a friend out in some manner, then violating probation with a drunk-driving arrest. While in prison, he devoted himself to Christianity; upon release, he became an executive VP at a mortgage company and served as preacher at the Dallas Youth Village.
In 2019, he developed diabetes, and complications led to the amputation of a leg.
“In the darkest days of my sickness,” he writes, “after my leg had been cut off, I wanted to die.”
Penick, though, retains a will to live, drawing on his faith and family.
At 100 pages, the book is a quick read. It is written by Stephen Alexander, a former colleague of mine at the Portland Tribune. Stephen’s father, Drew Mahalic, was a teammate of Penick’s at Notre Dame.
► ◄
Gridiron Legacy: Pro Football’s Missing Origin Story
By Gregg Ficery
The Ringer
This is a beautiful coffee table book, detailing what the author unveils as the early years of pro football, beginning in the 1890s and covering through 1920. It is not, however, merely a picture book. There is plenty of copy and a wealth of facts and figures illustrated by a remarkable number of photographs from that era.
The book reminds me of “Oregon State University Football Vault,” a history book I wrote in 2009. That one, though, was a picture book along with a plethora of facsimiles (not just photos) of game programs, tickets and other memorabilia. “Gridiron Legacy” has much more written information and prose.
Ficery has a personal interest in all of this. His great-grandfather, Bob Shiring, was a central figure in the development of pro football, a lineman and star with the legendary Massillon (Ohio) Tigers. Selections from Shiring’s photo collection greatly enhance the presentation of this book.
I had a personal interest, too, in reading more about Edward J. Stewart, whom I had researched for my “Football Vault” and “Civil War Rivalry” books. Always listed in record books as “E.J. Stewart” but also known as “Doc,” Stewart served as head coach in football, basketball and baseball at Oregon State during a period from 1911-16. Prior to that, however, Stewart was the man responsible for organizing the Tigers, served time as coach and “manager” during their heyday and, ironically, was also sports editor of the local newspaper.
Stewart played a central role in a gambling scandal in 1906 involving the Tigers and rival Canton, the latter the forerunner to the American Professional Football Association, which became the NFL.
The author did his research. We learn about the first pro teams (in Ohio and Pennsylvania), the first player paid to pay football (Pudge Heffilfinger in 1892), the first football “World Series” (1903), the first black professional player (Charles Follis, “The Black Cyclone,” in 1905) and the first forward pass (by Charley Moran, who would go on to umpire in the National League for 22 years, in 1906). We read about the great Massillon teams that won four straight Ohio League championships, some early indoor football played in New York’s Madison Square Garden and the role of the legendary Jim Thorpe.
There was plenty of crossover between Major League Baseball and the early professional football days. Hall of Fame pitcher Christy Mathewson played some pro football, legendary manager Connie Mack coached it and Branch Rickey played football with Charley Follis some 44 years before signing Jackie Robinson to a contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
There was crossover, too, between amateur and pro football in those years. College football was bigger than pro ball at the time; pro teams played by college rules, not the other way around. Pro teams scheduled college teams, and no collegians were ruled ineligible because of it. If a collegian accepted money, however, that was a different story. No wonder enforcement was so difficult in that era.
It’s a hoss of a book, 350 pages long. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
► ◄
Readers: what are your thoughts? I would love to hear them in the comments below. On the comments entry screen, only your name is required, your email address and website are optional, and may be left blank.
Follow me on X (formerly Twitter).
Like me on Facebook.
Find me on Instagram.
Be sure to sign up for my emails.
