EPISODE 145: The United Football League – With Michael Huyghue

We kick off the new year with a return to the gridiron, and a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the brash, but ultimately ill-fated United Football League of 2009-12 – with its only commissioner, Michael Huyghue (Behind the Line of Scrimmage: Inside the Front Office of the NFL).

Formed in 2007 out of big-budget dreams to establish a national top-tier, Fall-season minor league pro football circuit by high-wattage investors like San Francisco investment banker Bill Hambrecht, Google executive Tim Armstrong and Dallas Mavericks owner/firebrand Mark Cuban (who later backed out, along with initially-rumored financier T. Boone Pickens) – the UFL was also conveniently timed to capitalize on fallout from any potential labor/owner strife prior to the 2011-12 NFL season, when the league’s collective bargaining agreement with its players expired.  The bet backfired when a correctly-anticipated owner lockout of players quickly ended in July of 2011, ensuring no regular season disruption or drama.

Over the course of its history, five teams played in the league: the Las Vegas Locomotives, Hartford Colonials (originally the New York Sentinels), Omaha Nighthawks, Sacramento Mountain Lions (née California Redwoods), and Virginia Destroyers (successors to the Florida Tuskers).  The Locomotives were historically the best of the franchises, winning two of the UFL’s three championship games, and possessing an undefeated regular season record when the league suspended operations (ultimately for good) in mid-Fall 2012.  Big-name NFL coaches like Jim Haslett, Jay Gruden, Dennis Green, Marty Schottenheimer, and Jim Fassel were featured attractions, as were recognizable pro talent like Simeon Rice, Josh McCown, Daunte Culpepper, and Jeff Garcia – to name just a few.

Huyghue walks host Tim Hanlon through the numerous ups, frequent downs and multiple sideways’ of the UFL’s brief lifespan, including: how early-career front office experiences in the NFL (Lions, Jaguars), WLAF (Birmingham Fire), and NFL Players’ Association uniquely prepared him to the UFL commissioner’s role; league ownership’s original intention to play as a Spring league; the allure of then-untapped pro markets like Omaha, Las Vegas Sacramento; and lessons learned that could have helped last year’s AAF and this year’s soon-to-launch XFL.

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EPISODE 144: Year-End Holiday Spectacular – With Paul Reeths & Andy Crossley

We put the wraps on an event-filled 2019 with our first-annual holiday roundtable spectacular featuring the return of fellow defunct sports enthusiasts Paul Reeths (OurSportsCentral.com, StatsCrew.com & Episode 46) and Andy Crossley (Fun While It Lasted & Episode 2) – for a spirited discussion about the past, present and potential future of “forgotten” pro sports teams and leagues.

It’s a no-holds-barred look back on some of the year’s most notable events and discoveries, including:

• The short rise and quick demise of the Alliance of American Football;

• Major League Soccer’s (unsustainable?) expansion to thirty teams;

• The folding of the Arena Football League – again;

• Major League Baseball’s minor league contraction plan; AND

• Raiders NFL football moves on from Oakland for good.

As well as some predictions on what might transpire in 2020, as:

• The second coming of Vince McMahon’s XFL kicks off in February;

• Baseball celebrates the Negro Leagues’ 100th anniversary;

• Las Vegas takes its biggest sports gamble yet with the Raiders;

• The MLS Players’ Association flexes its pre-season bargaining muscles;

• The Chargers and Clippers grapple with second-fiddle status in LA; AND

• Mark Cuban’s Professional Futsal League . . . well, your guess is as good as ours!

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EPISODE 143: Negro League Superstar Oscar Charleston – With Jeremy Beer

Baseball biographer Jeremy Beer (Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player) joins the podcast this week to discuss the life and career of one of baseball’s greatest, though largely unsung, players – and provide us a convenient excuse for a deeper dive into the endlessly fascinating vagaries of the sport’s legendary Negro Leagues.

Buck O’Neil once described Oscar Charleston as “Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one,” while baseball historian Bill James ranked him as the fourth-best player of all time – inclusive of the Major Leagues, in which he never played.  During his prime, he became a legend in Cuba as well one of black America’s most popular celebrities.  Yet even among serious sports fans, Charleston is virtually unknown today.

In a lengthy career spanning 1915-54, Charleston played against, managed, befriended, and occasionally brawled with baseball greats like Lou Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove, Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Jesse Owens, Roy Campanella, and Branch Rickey – with a competitive “hothead” reputation that sometimes brought him trouble – but more often delivered victories, championships, and profound respect.

Charleston played for 11 clubs across at least five different Negro Leagues, and doubled as manager for a number of them – including the 1935 Negro National League pennant-winning Pittsburgh Crawfords – considered by many baseball scholars to be the best black baseball team of all time.

Though he never got the chance to play in the bigs, Charleston was still a trailblazer – becoming the first African-American to work as a Major League scout, when Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey hired him for to oversee his fledgling United Baseball League “Brown Dodgers” feeder club.

A National Baseball Hall of Fame inductee in 1976, Charleston’s combined record as a player, manager, and scout makes him the most accomplished figure in black baseball history – and, without question, beyond.

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EPISODE 142: Birmingham’s Black Barons – With Bill Plott

Journalist-author/Alabama native Bill Plott (Black Baseball's Last Team Standing: The Birmingham Black Barons) joins the show to help us discover more about the legendary Negro League franchise regarded by most baseball historians as the “jewel of Southern black baseball."

The first Black Barons team began in 1920 as charter members of the Negro Southern League, an eight-member circuit that largely mirrored the all-white minor-league Southern Association – right down to the sharing of ballparks.  Three years later, Birmingham made the leap to Rube Foster’s major league Negro National League, black baseball’s highest professional level at the time – soon to feature eventual All-Star legends like George “Mule” Suttles and Leroy “Satchel” Paige.

The team survived the Great Depression by bouncing between the major Negro National and minor Negro Southern leagues during the 1930s, finally returning to the bigs in 1940 via the newly ascendant Negro American League.

The 1940s was the zenith of the franchise's history, catalyzed by new owners Tom Hayes (a prominent Memphis funeral home operator) and sports entrepreneur Abe Saperstein – whose Harlem Globetrotters provided off-season employment to some of the players.  (Reese Tatum, the team’s popular centerfielder, joined the ‘Trotters as “Goose” Tatum, the “Clown Prince of Basketball” – eventually earning greater fame for his achievements on the hardwood than those on the diamond.)

The Black Barons were among the Negro Leagues’ elite teams, winning NAL pennants (though losing Negro World Series’) in 1943, 1944 and 1948 – and featured a who’s who of standout on-field talent such as Lorenzo "Piper" Davis, Lyman Bostock, Bill Powell, Bill Barnes, Joe Bankhead, Ed Steele, Bill Greason, Artie Wilson, Jehosie Heard, and a teenage sensation named Willie Mays – many of whom left for the soon-to-be integrated major leagues.

Birmingham soldiered on post-integration into the 1950s, striving to maintain professional relevance and outlasting most of the remaining Negro League teams in the process; by 1960, the Black Barons had been reduced to a barnstorming outfit, fading into obscurity against the backdrop of the Civil Rights movement – giving up the ghost for good in 1963.

Still, the team’s legend – and original ballpark (Birmingham’s Rickwood Field) – live on.

PLUS: Charley Pride gets traded for a team bus!

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EPISODE 141: The National Bowling League – With Dr. Jake Schmidt

We hit the lanes this week to delve into the fascinating story of the nation’s first and only attempt at a professional team bowling league – a seemingly anachronistic idea by today’s standards, but a concept that made total sense in the early 1960s when pro bowling was in ascendance and the sport was seemingly everywhere on television.

Bowlers Journal columnist and historian J.R. “Dr. Jake” Schmidt (The Bowling Chronicles: Collected Writings of Dr. Jake) joins the podcast to lay out the curious backstory, short-lived season(s) and unwitting legacy of the National Bowling League (1960-62) – an ambitious, but altogether logical attempt to professionalize bowling in the style of America’s other major team sports, and capitalize on the big money purses beginning to fuel national TV competitions during the late 1950s.

Amidst a bevy of popular made-for-TV competitions that featured various takes on head-to-head play – like NBC’s weekly Championship Bowling, and primetime’s Make That Spare (ABC) and Jackpot Bowling (NBC) – the coast-to-coast NBL hoped to offer bowling professionals a city-based team format, replete with purposely-designed television-friendly arenas and boisterous fans.

Despite investment from deep-pocketed funders like AFL founder Lamar Hunt and oilman/Cotton Bowl creator J. Curtis Sanford (whose Dallas-based 72-lane Bronco Bowl set the standard for NBL facilities); a well-publicized draft (with then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson in attendance); and a novel scoring system that featured situational bonus points and wild-card substitutions, the NBL stumbled out of the gate devoid of the very thing it needed most to succeed – a national television contract.

Outfoxed by the nascent Pro Bowlers Association – which was simultaneously pioneering a laddered individual vs. individual national tour format with a similarly fledgling ABC-TV – the NBL had to rely solely on individual gates while trying to convince other networks to take notice.  Early crowds were sparse to virtually non-existent, and most pros found the money, light workload and broad television exposure of the PBA’s “Pro Bowlers’ Tour” to be the better path to ply their wares.

It’s a tale of what might have been – and we “spare” no question in our pursuit of the story of this most intriguing of forgotten pro leagues!

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EPISODE 140: NFL Football’s Chicago Cardinals – With Joe Ziemba

Author and unwitting pro football historian Joe Ziemba (When Football Was Football: The Chicago Cardinals and the Birth of the NFL) help us set the record straight on the often-misunderstood history of the first incarnation of pro football’s oldest continuous club – now know as the Arizona Cardinals.

Arguably the least successful franchise in National Football League history, the Chicago version of the Cardinals originated years before the start of the NFL (née American Professional Football Association) as the Morgan Athletic Club – a dominant entry in Chicago’s fledgling amateur football leagues owned by house painter/plumber/visionary Chris O’Brien.

In 1920, O’Brien’s club ponied up $100 to become a charter member of the APFA, quickly developing a pointed rivalry with a fellow founding franchise called the Decatur Staleys – soon to become the cross-town Chicago Bears two years later.

Despite technically winning its first NFL championship in 1925 (controversially declared by Commissioner Joe Carr after the season-dominating Pottsville [PA] Maroons played an unauthorized post-season game against collegiate powerhouse Notre Dame), and eventual new ownership (Bears VP Charley Bidwill bought the Depression-challenged club in 1932) – the Cardinals played consistently losing football through the end of World War II, and often in the shadow of the more popular and successful Bears to the north.

Aside from some short-lived success in 1947 (winning its second [or first?] league championship under coach James Conzelman and a vaunted “Million Dollar Backfield” of stars Paul Christman, Pat Harder, Elmer Angsman, and Charley Trippi), and in 1948 (losing a close final to Philadelphia is a driving snowstorm) – the Chicago Cardinals were regular laughingstocks of the NFL.  The Bidwill family’s tightfisted finances yielded reliably uncompetitive teams – known more for comically slapstick play and regularly sparse crowds than quality football.

After rebuffing an offer to sell the team by entrepreneurial pro football aspirant Lamar Hunt, the Bidwills deserted the Windy City in favor of St. Louis after the 1959 season.

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EPISODE 139: The NHL’s Kansas City Scouts – With Troy Treasure

Veteran Missouri-area sportswriter Troy Treasure (Icing on the Plains: The Rough Ride of Kansas City’s NHL Scouts) joins the podcast this week to delve into the mostly forgotten (and woeful) two-season saga of the 1974 National Hockey League expansion franchise now known as the New Jersey Devils.

Along with the Washington Capitals, the Scouts were the last additions in the NHL’s aggressive expansion cycle begun in 1967, and a logical progression for a metro area historically steeped in minor league hockey.  While team president Edwin Thompson sought to call the club “Mo-Hawks” to reflect the geographical bond between neighboring Missouri and Kansas, Chicago’s similar-sounding Black Hawks squawked in opposition – leading to a community-sourced renaming to “Scouts” after a famous statue overlooking the city.

A construction-delayed (and livestock/rodeo-occupied) Kemper Arena forced the team to play its first month of games on the road (record: 0-7-1), until a 11/2/74 home debut (loss) to Chicago.  Their first win finally came the next day away at fellow debutante Washington – the only team to finish the season with a worse record than the Scouts’ 15-54-11.

The next season began more promisingly with KC a mere point out of contention for the NHL’s charitable playoffs by the end of December 1975.  However, the team crashed and burned over its remaining 44 games – posting a remarkably futile 1-35-8 record through season’s end.   

While rumors of relocation dogged the Scouts as early as the 1975 off-season, the club’s unwieldy ownership structure (at least two dozen investors), limited capital and thin talent pool (exacerbated by NHL expansion and a free-spending WHA) – all against a backdrop of a national economic recession –conspired against the Scouts even before they took to the ice.

Relocation to Denver to become the Colorado Rockies came swiftly in the summer of 1976, and Kansas City’s brief and forgettable fling with top-flight pro hockey was quickly over.

Treasure helps us dissect some of the Scouts’ more notable moments – and surmises why and how the NHL may someday again find its way back to the City of Fountains.

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EPISODE 138: The International Volleyball Association - With Jay Hanseth

You can be forgiven if you never heard of the International Volleyball Association – the mid-1970s co-ed pro circuit that aimed to draft off the rising popularity of Olympic and beach volleyball during America’s wildest sports decade – but the high-wattage media and entertainment moguls behind its creation at the time certainly cannot.

The IVA was the brainchild of prolific Hollywood television and film producer David Wolper (Roots, The Thorn Birds and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory to name a mere few) – who became smitten with the sport while filming documentary footage of the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Wolper quickly recruited a who’s who of well-connected LA-based investors – including ABC-TV (later Paramount and Fox) chief Barry Diller, as well as Motown music studio founder/movie producer aspirant Berry Gordy – and by 1975, a five-team California and Southwest-centric league bowed before modest, but enthusiastic crowds.

Ironically, with nary a television contract in sight (despite players Mary Jo Peppler and Linda Fernandez appearing on ABC’s Superstars competition, and coverage of 1977’s IVA All-Star Game on CBS’ Sports Spectacular), most of the big-name investors had pulled out by 1976.

Volleyball publisher Jim Bartlett stepped in to quietly stabilize the league, with legendary basketball big man and beach enthusiast Wilt Chamberlain joining for various roles as player, coach, commissioner, and publicity magnet.  But neither could ultimately overcome the PR disaster of a 1979 mid-match police bust of Denver Comets owner-brothers Robert and David Casey (for drug trafficking), nor the promotion-deflating boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics where the US women’s team was expected to medal.

IVA standout and beach volleyball legend Jay Hanseth joins the podcast to help “dig” into one of pro sports’ most enigmatic and endlessly fascinating leagues.

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EPISODE 137: Basketball’s Marvin “Bad News” Barnes – With Mike Carey

Marvin “Bad News” Barnes was considered a future Hall of Fame basketball player before he even graduated from college.  A standout at Providence (averaging 20.7 points and 17.9 rebounds a game, and leading the Friars to the NCAA Final Four in 1973), Barnes was a consensus 1974 All-American with the world at his fingertips.

Although Barnes enjoyed two flamboyantly successful years in the American Basketball Association with the colorful Spirits of St. Louis – where he won 1974-75 Rookie of the Year honors, as well as All-Star accolades both seasons – his career quickly fizzled in the post-merger NBA, where he wore out his welcome with the Detroit Pistons, Buffalo Braves, Boston Celtics, and San Diego Clippers in just four years.

By 1980, Barnes’ unpredictable idiosyncrasies – fueled by chronic drug and alcohol abuse – had turned a can’t-miss pro basketball superstar into a prematurely past-his-prime has-been.

Longtime Boston sportswriter Mike Carey ("Bad News": The Turbulent Life of Marvin Barnes, Pro Basketball's Original Renegade) joins this week’s show to delve into the tragic story of a supremely gifted athlete whose self-destructive nature took him from sure-fire basketball greatness to a life of homeless panhandling, drug dealing and pimping on the mean streets of East San Diego, and five years in prison.

Even with seemingly limitless chances to turn things around, Barnes was repeatedly undone by predictable slides back into addiction and reckless behavior – ultimately succumbing to acute cocaine and heroin intoxication in 2014 at age 62. 

The story of Marvin Barnes is one of squandered talent, met by tragically unconquerable inner demons.

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EPISODE 136: Kansas City vs. Oakland – With Matt Ehrlich

We amp up the intellectual quotient this week with University of Illinois journalism professor emeritus Matt Ehrlich (Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era), who joins for a heady discussion around the most unlikely, yet intertwined of pro sports rivalries – and the turbulent 1960s from which it originated.

Although Oakland, CA and Kansas City, MO are geographically distant and significantly different in numerous ways, their histories actually have more in common than meets the eye, Ehrlich argues, as both cities during the Sixties:

• Shared big-city inferiority complexes (blue-collar Oakland constantly overshadowed by the richer, more culturally diverse San Francisco across the Bay; bucolic Kansas City perceived as the quintessentially Midwestern “cow town”);

• Experienced contentious race and labor relations;

• Countered “white flight” suburbanization with ambitious urban renewal efforts; and, notably:

• Featured civic-championing newspaper sports editors and government officials eager to attract top-level pro franchises in a quest for “major league” status.

Ehrlich suggests that each city’s driving ambitions to secure professional sports teams – and the national attention and civic pride that came with them – helped mutually ignite fierce rivalries (AFL/NFL football’s Chiefs and Raiders; baseball’s first-Kansas City-then-Oakland As) that thrilled local fans.  But even with Super Bowl victories and World Series triumphs, major league sports proved little defense against the broader urban challenges roiling the country during the tumultuous 60s & 70s.

Ehrlich’s thesis features a cast of legendary sports characters like Len Dawson, Al Davis, Lamar Hunt, George Brett, Charlie Finley, and Reggie Jackson – and is a chronicle of two emergent major league cities forced to balance soaring civic aspirations with the harsh urban realities of racial turmoil, labor conflict, and economic crises.

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EPISODE 135: The Curse of the Clippers – With Mick Minas

We pick up where we left off in Episode #89 (The NBA Buffalo Braves – With Tim Wendel), with the continuing story of one of pro hoops’ most forlorn franchises – today known as the Los Angeles Clippers.

Author Mick Minas (The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers) joins the podcast from his home in Melbourne, Australia to help us go deep into the travails of a club labeled by many as the NBA’s most historically dysfunctional – and by some as simply cursed.

From its highly convoluted cross-country relocation to San Diego in 1978 to its still-chaotic life as Los Angeles’ “other” NBA team (and the Staples Center’s third-priority sports tenant) – the Clippers have had enough wayward turns of fate to fill an entire league, let alone a single franchise:

• The high-profile 1979 coup of All-Star center (and San Diego native) Bill Walton, whose career literally and figuratively crumbled under the weight of chronic foot injuries;

• League fines, investigations and lawsuits against team owner Donald Sterling – including the team’s unauthorized relocation to Los Angeles in 1984;

• The “Clipper Triangle” of injuries to star players like Derek Smith, Norm Nixon, Marques Johnson, and Danny Manning – and league-record setting seasons of futility;

• The disruption of the club’s first playoff appearance in 1992 by the Los Angeles riots;

• Siren songs of Anaheim; AND

• The sordid 2014 scandal that led to Sterling’s ouster and subsequent/still-in-process “rebirth” under new owner Steve Ballmer.

PLUS: Will the Clippers stay in LA?

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EPISODE 134: The World League of American Football’s London Monarchs – With Alex Cassidy

By popular request, we begin our exploration of the enigmatic 1990s international experiment known (initially) as the World League of American Football with a deep dive into its first championship team – the London Monarchs – with author Alex Cassidy (American Football's Forgotten Kings: The Rise and Fall of the London Monarchs).

Resurrected from an idea originated (but never launched) by the NFL in 1974 called the “International Football League,” the WLAF was formed in 1989 as both a spring developmental circuit as well as an operational test bed for full-fledged expansion of American football into markets outside the United States.

Eventually comprised exclusively of European teams by 1995 (later under the banners “NFL Europe” from [1998-2006] and “NFL Europa” [2007]), the first two seasons of the WLAF also featured a Canadian franchise (the Montreal Machine) as well as six in the US – most of which (Orlando, Birmingham, Sacramento, San Antonio, Raleigh-Durham [1991], and Columbus, OH [1992]) were historically forlorn pro markets.

The Monarchs played their first two seasons at the original/famed Wembley Stadium and became an immediate sensation in London, averaging over 40,000 fans per game – including a league-record-setting 61,108 for the WLAF’s inaugural World Bowl 21-0 championship over the Barcelona Dragons on June 9, 1991. 

Though the team never achieved the level of success or stability in the years that followed (the league’s return in 1995 began a peripatetic journey of future home stadiums across London, as well as Bristol and Manchester), the Monarchs boasted a memorable array of characters that – like other WLAF/NFLE teams – consisted of veteran NFL journeymen and promising young developmental talent from both the US and the Continent, including:

• Kicker Phil Alexander, the league's 1991 points leader (and now Managing Director of Crystal Palace);

• RB Victor Ebubedike, the first European native to score a touchdown (vs. the Orlando Thunder, 4/6/91):

• Journeyman NFL QB Stan Gelbaugh, 1991’s WLAF Offensive Player of the Year; and

• Former Chicago Bears Super Bowl-winning defensive lineman William “Refrigerator”Perry.

PLUS: The “Yo-Go” Monarchs theme song!

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EPISODE 133: Baseball’s Original Miami Marlins – With Sam Zygner

We “celebrate” the 2019 Miami Marlins’ National League-worst 57-105 season with a look back to colorful 1950s-era Triple-A minor league franchise that laid the groundwork for South Florida’s eventual ascension to the majors in 1993.

Author and SABR historian Sam Zygner (The Forgotten Marlins: A Tribute to the 1956-1960 Original Miami Marlins and Baseball Under the Palms: The History of Miami Minor League Baseball) joins the podcast to discuss the flamboyant, but little-remembered International League club that introduced Miami to its first taste of high-level regular season baseball. 

During their five years of existence, the original Marlins featured outsized personalities such as eccentric manager (and former St. Louis Cardinals’ “Gashouse Gang” member) Pepper Martin, hard-living lefty pitcher Mickey McDermott, maverick baseball promoter Bill Veeck, and even the mythically ageless Negro League hurler (and eventual Hall of Famer) Satchel Paige.   

In between, the Marlins featured a who’s who of battle-hardened veterans (like 18-year minor league journeyman Woody Smith; ex-New York Giants World Series-winning pitcher Rubén “El Divino Loco” Gómez; two-time MLB All-Star slugger Sid Gordon; former Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Cal Abrams; and major league All-Star fireballer Virgil Trucks) – as well as a parade of future big-league standouts such as infielder Jerry Adair; outfielders Whitey Herzog and Dave Nicholson; and pitchers Rudy Árias, Don Cardwell, Turk Farrell, Jack Fisher and Dallas Green.  

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EPISODE 132: ABA Basketball Memories – With Hall of Famer Dan Issel

Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame legend Dan Issel joins this week’s ‘cast to discuss his All-Star career in the American Basketball Association with two of the league’s most (relatively) stable franchises – the Kentucky Colonels and the Denver Nuggets.  And a brief cup of coffee with one its shakiest, in between.

After an outstanding, twice-named All-American collegiate career at the University of Kentucky (where he still remains as all-time leading scorer) in the late 1960s, Issel spurned a draft call by the NBA’s Detroit Pistons for a chance to stay in the Commonwealth with the John Y. Brown-owned, Louisville-based Colonels.

Joining an already solid lineup (including future Hall of Famer Louis Dampier), Issel immediately lit up the 1970-71 ABA with a league-leading 29.9 points-per-game – powering Kentucky to the ABA Finals (losing to the Utah Stars in seven games), and a share of the league’s Rookie of the Year title.

An eventual six-time ABA All-Star (including his and the league’s final season with the later NBA-absorbed Nuggets), Issel’s prolific scoring touch help lead the Colonels to its first and only league championship in 1975 – later “rewarded” with an unpopular Brown-directed trade to Denver, by way of curious detour to the Baltimore Claws – a franchise that lasted only three pre-season games. 

Issel ultimately became the ABA’s second all-time leading scorer (behind Dampier), and upon his retirement from the NBA Nuggets in 1985, only Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Julius Erving had amassed more points (he now sits 11th all time).

We obsess with Issel about his trials and tribulations across the ABA – as well as his current role in helping Louisville return to the pro game with its pursuit of a long-elusive NBA franchise.

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EPISODE 131: Calling Balls & Strikes in Baseball’s Negro Leagues – With Byron Motley

Multi-talented singer-songwriter, photographer, and soon-to-be sports history documentarian Byron Motley joins the show this week to discuss his late father’s colorful career as an umpire in baseball’s legendary Negro Leagues – the subject of his 2007 collaborative oral history, Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants, and Stars.

A child of Depression-era rural Alabama, a teenaged Bob Motley migrated north in the early 1940s to his uncle’s home in Dayton, OH in search of work – and a tryout as a Negro League pitcher.  World War II intervened, and Motley was soon off to the front lines as one of the first African-Americans in the then-segregated (Montfort Point) Marines – receiving both a Purple Heart (shot in the foot during combat) and a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor for his service.

While recovering from his wounds, Motley caught wind of a baseball game outside his military hospital and volunteered to umpire – crutches and all.  Despite earning him an immediate trip back to the battlefield, it set the stage for his post-discharge career ambitions.

Relocated to Kansas City in 1946, Motley supplemented his day job at a local GM plant with persistent attempts to umpire games with KC’s fabled Monarchs, ultimately yielding a decade-long moonlighting career calling contests across the Negro Leagues.  Known for a flamboyant acrobatic style, Motley became nationally known as the most entertaining game-caller in the Negro majors – as much an attraction as the pioneering players and teams themselves.

Though a Major League call-up never came, Motley still broke barriers in Triple-A and NCAA ball, and was instrumental in helping usher in the eventual arrival of the first African-American umpire (his Pacific Coast League colleague Emmett Ashford) in 1966.  

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EPISODE 130: St. Louis: The Original Soccer City USA – With Dave Lange

On August 20, 2019, the city of St. Louis, MO was officially awarded the 28th franchise in Major League Soccer, with an anticipated inaugural season beginning in 2022.  And while the club begins its efforts to get its team name, new downtown stadium and initial soccer operations in place, we take some time this week to reflect on the city’s deep and rich soccer history – perhaps unmatched by any locale in the United States.

Dave Lange (Soccer Made in St. Louis: A History of the Game in America’s First Soccer Capital) joins the ‘cast to trace the undeniably symbiotic relationship between the Gateway City and the Beautiful Game – as well as its impact on the development of the sport (especially professionally) across America.

As we root for the new St. Louis MLS team (our name suggestion: Gateway FC!) to meaningfully recognize and incorporate this important past, Lange helps tide us over in the interim as he discusses:

• The St. Louis transplant who help launch both the USA’s first governing body for the sport, as well as its first professional league (the American Soccer League) during the Roaring Twenties;

• The deep-rooted amateur, scholastic and collegiate landscape that kept the city at the center of the nation’s soccer development (including occasional US national team flashes of brilliance);

• The seminal, but oft-forgotten St. Louis Stars of the 1967 NPSL and 1968-77 NASL;

• How “soc-hoc” evolved into a professional indoor soccer explosion in the 1980s & 90s with St. Louis (Steamers, Storm, Ambush) as its epicenter; AND

• The “invisible hand” of Anheuser Busch executive Denny Long.

PLUS:  There “Ain’t No Stoppin’” our tribute to the MISL’s iconic St. Louis Steamers!

Soccer Made in St. Louis: A History of the Game in America’s First Soccer Capital - buy here

EPISODE 129: ABA Basketball's Origin Story – With Founder Dennis Murphy

The American Basketball Association was not founder Dennis Murphy’s original intent. 

Thwarted in his attempt to get the fast-growing city of Anaheim, CA (he was mayor of nearby Buena Park) into the fledgling American Football League during the mid-1960s, Murphy quickly pivoted his attention to basketball – reasoning that with only 12 teams in the staid, yet long-established National Basketball Association, there surely must have been room for more.

“What the hell,” Murphy told author Terry Pluto in his seminal 1990 oral history Loose Balls.  “The AFL had worked, hadn't it?  Maybe we could force a merger with the NBA."

By the end of the ABA’s ninth season in 1976, Murphy’s unwitting prescience had become reality – and along with it, a validating blueprint for how to modernize professional sports in North America.

The legendarily inveterate sports entrepreneur (Murph: The Sports Entrepreneur Man and His Leagues) joins the podcast to discuss how the iconically idiosyncratic ABA got started, as well as hints of how other future pursuits – like the World Hockey Association, World Team Tennis, the World Football League, and Roller Hockey International – would similarly come to be. 

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Loose Balls: The Short, Wild Life of the American Basketball Association - buy here

Murph: The Sports Entrepreneur Man and His Leagues - buy here

Game Changer: The Dennis Murphy Story - watch here

EPISODE 128: NASL Soccer’s Chicago Sting – With Mike Conklin

Prolific Chicago Tribune sportswriter Mike Conklin (Goal Fever!; Transfer U.) joins the podcast to help us go deep into the story of the North American Soccer League’s twice-champion Chicago Sting – a club he covered extensively and exclusively from its little-noticed launch in late 1974 all the way through its breakthrough Soccer Bowl ’81 title.

The personal passion project of prominent Chicago commodities trader Lee Stern, the Sting came to life as one of five expansion franchises for the NASL’s ambitious 1975 campaign, and the team’s early seasons were heavily British-flavored under coach (and former Manchester United legend) Bill Foulkes. 

Despite winning a division title in 1976, the Sting was largely uncompetitive during its first few seasons – and worse, drew poorly as the team shuffled games between Soldier Field, Comiskey Park, and Wrigley Field each summer.  By 1978 – when they went 0-10 to start the season – the Sting had the worst attendance in the entire 24-team NASL, averaging a mere 4,188 fans per match. 

Things rebounded later that year, however, when assistant coach (and early NPSL/NASL player) Willy Roy was permanently elevated to head coach, and an influx of standout German players like Karl-Heinz Granitza, Arno Steffenhagen, Horst Blankenburg, and Hertha Berlin’s Jorgen Kristensen soon turned “Der Sting” into one of the league’s most exciting and attractive sides.

By 1980, the club had vaulted into the league’s elite – including and especially an uncanny mastery over the oft-dominant New York Cosmos – which ultimately extended into the 1981 NASL final, securing Chicago’s first professional sports championship since the Bears’ NFL title in 1963.

Conklin was there to chronicle all of it as the Tribune’s Sting beat reporter – and we dig in with to recall some of the club’s most memorable moments.

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Goal Fever! - buy here

Transfer U. - buy here

1975 Chicago Sting Tee from Streaker Sports - buy here

1981 NASL Soccer Bowl Tee from Streaker Sports - buy here

EPISODE 127: A British View of US Pro Soccer History – With Tom Scholes

UK sportswriter Tom Scholes (Stateside Soccer: The Definitive History of Soccer in the United States) joins host Tim Hanlon to discuss the surprisingly long, colorfully vibrant and regularly misunderstood history of the world’s most popular sport in America.

While even the most erudite of the game’s international scholars mistakenly (though understandably) define the US pro game’s epicenter as the chaotic, post-1966 World Cup launch of the North American Soccer League – the roots of organized soccer actually date as far back as the American Civil War, around the time when the first rules around “American football” were also coming into focus.

In fact, US soccer’s actual first “golden age” can be traced to the Roaring 1920s when immigrant-rich corporate teams in the first American Soccer League rivaled the nascent National Football League in popularity, and US national teams regularly qualified for the first-ever FIFA World Cups in 1930 (finishing third) and 1934.

While a heavily ethnic successor ASL and regional semi-pro circuits kept American soccer’s flickering flame alive (not to mention an international headline-grabbing 1950 World Cup upset of then-world power England), the organized game in the United States continued to grow – albeit regionally niche and nationally inchoate – especially at the pro level.

Yet, the Bill Cox-created International Soccer League of the early 1960s proved that American fan interest in top-flight professional soccer played by the world’s premier clubs was real – setting the kindling for the NASL’s eventual wildfire during the following decade, yet eventual flameout in 1984.

Since then, Scholes suggests, the US has finally entered its third golden age of soccer – as the no-longer “new” Major League Soccer closes in on its 24th consecutive season of growth (recently adding history-rich St. Louis as its 28th North American market) – while the women’s national team extends its unprecedented dominance on the international stage.

Still, soccer’s future success in America is by no means guaranteed – and the frequent travails of America’s long history with the game provide ample lessons of what might ultimately lie ahead.

Enjoy a FREE MONTH of The Great Courses Plus streaming video service – including the new series “Fundamentals of Photography” – created in conjunction with National Geographic!

Stateside Soccer: The Definitive History of Soccer in the United States - buy here

EPISODE 126: CBA Basketball’s Fort Wayne Fury – With Rob Brown

After extraordinary listener response to our Episode #118 with David Levine a few months back, we bounce-pass our way back to the endlessly intriguing Continental Basketball Association for this week’s conversation – this time with a focus on the league’s travails during the 1990s, courtesy of the Fort Wayne (IN) Fury and its former radio voice/media relations director Rob Brown.

More than forty years since the relocation of the NBA’s seminal Pistons from the Summit City to Detroit (and a decade before the arrival of the current-day G-League Mad Ants), the Fury held court at the city’s Allen County War Memorial Coliseum from 1991 until the league’s first demise in 2001 – winning the CBA’s regular season title in 1998, after narrowly losing the league championship finals two seasons earlier.

Brown recounts some of his standout memories from his time with the Fury, including:

• Playing second fiddle to the Komets, Fort Wayne’s minor league hockey juggernaut;

• The harrowing 50-foot fall of team mascot “Sabre” from the Coliseum’s ceiling during a 1996 playoff game;

• Indiana Hoosier legend Keith Smart’s final year of playing and first year of pro coaching – both with the Fury;

• The short-lived playing career of Percy Miller – better known as rap superstar Master P; AND

• Why today’s Fort Wayne Mad Ants owe a debt of gratitude to both the Fury and the CBA.

PLUS:  The real origin of New York Knicks/ESPN broadcaster Mike Breen’s signature three-point call!

Enjoy a FREE MONTH of The Great Courses Plus streaming video service – including the new series “Fundamentals of Photography” – created in conjunction with National Geographic!