EPISODE 334: Atlanta's "White Ice" - With Tom Aiello

Valdosta State University history professor (and Episode 244 guest) Tom Aiello ("Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South") returns after a two-year absence - for an enlightening look at the curious cultural history of the city of Atlanta's awkward relationship with professional hockey.

In his new book "White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey," Aiello interestingly juxtaposes the National Hockey League's aggressive expansion in the late 1960s/early 1970s (including a new WHA-hastened Flames franchise in 1972), against the city's de facto status as the "capital of the Deep South" - and its population's rapidly changing racial and socio-economic contours.

To wit:

For its own part, Atlanta had been watching as White residents left the city for the suburbs over the course of the 1960s. As the turn of the decade approached, city leadership was searching for ways to mitigate white flight and bring residents of the surrounding suburbs back to the city center. So when a stereotypically White sport came to the Deep South in 1971 in the form of the Flames, ownership saw a new opportunity to appeal to White audiences.  But the challenge would be selling a game that was foreign to most of Atlanta’s longtime sports fans.

Against that backdrop, of course, the Flames (1972-80) lasted but only eight seasons - and its NHL successor Atlanta Thrashers (1999-2011) did not fare much better in the face of similar and arguably even more pronounced circumstances.

And yet, the "dream" of another franchise lives on. Might Atlanta get a third chance to finally make pro hockey stick?  What's changed (and hasn't) in the region's demographic landscape and economic calculus?  

Listen in and find out!

White Ice: Race and the Making of Atlanta Hockey - buy book here

EPISODE 237: Pro Sports in Atlanta - It's Complicated (With Clayton Trutor)

By the time you hear this week's episode, the Atlanta Braves just may be celebrating their second-ever World Series trophy since moving from Milwaukee in 1956. 

If so, it would be the team's first title in 26 years, and only the second time in the region's modern sports history - or fourth, if you include the titles won by the now-defunct NASL's Atlanta Chiefs in 1968 and Major League Soccer's Atlanta United three years ago - that "The ATL" has been able to boast of any true major pro sports championship. 

That kind of futility can make any sports fan question their sanity, and as this week's guest Clayton Trutor ("Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta―and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports") tells us - in Atlanta's case, that self-doubt dates all the way back to the mid-1970s when one of its major newspapers dubbed the city "Loserville, USA".

As Trutor describes it, Atlanta's excitement around the arrival of four professional franchises during a dynamic six-year (1966-72) period quickly gave way to general frustration and, eventually, widespread apathy toward its home teams.  By the dawn of the 80s, all four of the region's major-league franchises were flailing in the standings, struggling to draw fans - and, in the case of the NHL's Flames, ready to move out of town.

While that indifference/malaise has dissipated somewhat in the decades since then (save for a second attempt at the NHL with the short-lived Thrashers), the dearth of team titles continues to loom over Atlanta's pro sports scene.

The resurgent Braves and their paradigm-changing Truist Park complex may just help change all that.

Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta - And How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports - buy book here

EPISODE 167: The “Down Goes Brown” History of the NHL – With Sean McIndoe

While we ruminate on what a potential resumption of the National Hockey League’s delayed 2020 regular season (and playoffs) might look like in the months ahead, we pause to look back at the rich, but altogether confounding history of the world’s premier pro hockey circuit with Down Goes Brown blog scribe and Athletic columnist Sean McIndoe (The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL: The World's Most Beautiful Sport, the World's Most Ridiculous League).

Over its often-illogical 103-year history, the NHL has proven to be – as the dust jacket to McIndoe’s loving, but irreverent book intimates – a league that often can't seem to get out of its own way:

“No matter how long you've been a hockey fan, you know that sinking feeling that maybe – just maybe – some of the people in charge here don't actually know what they're doing.  And at some point, you've probably wondered – has it always been this way? The short answer is yes.  As for the longer answer, well, that's this book.”

McIndoe helps us cheat-sheet through some of the league’s defining historical inflection points, including:

• The myth of the “Original Six” – the hallowed group of supposedly foundational franchises cemented during WWII-era 1942 – that conveniently ignores 15 teams that preceded them in the league’s first 25 years of existence;

• 1967’s “Great Expansion” – when the NHL doubled its franchise count from six to twelve, including preemptive strikes against the Western Hockey League with new teams in Los Angeles (Kings) and Oakland (Seals);

• The 1979 “merger” with the pesky World Hockey Association – which absorbed only four of the challenger’s seven remaining clubs; AND

• Comical expansion/relocation follies in Cleveland, Kansas City, Denver, and Atlanta (twice).

This week’s episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah’s new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

The “Down Goes Brown” History of the NHL: The World’s Most Beautiful Sport; The World’s Most Ridiculous League - buy book here

EPISODE #66: Sports Broadcaster JP Dellacamera

Fox Sports soccer play-by-play broadcaster extraordinaire JP Dellacamera joins the podcast this week to discuss a pioneering career in sports announcing spanning over 30 years – including calling this year’s 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia – his ninth consecutive men’s quadrennial assignment since Mexico ’86.

Widely acknowledged as the original voice of US Soccer, Dellacamera’s calls have become synonymous with some of modern-day American soccer’s most indelible moments – including his accounts of the US Women’s National Team’s dramatic penalty kick shootout victory over China in the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and Paul Caligiuri’s historic “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” against Trinidad & Tobago in the final game of 1989 CONCACAF qualifying that punched the US Men’s National Team’s ticket for Italy ’90 – ending a 40-year World Cup finals drought, and reorienting the sport’s trajectory in the ‘States for decades to come.

The road to broadcasting global soccer’s marquee events has by no means been a straight and narrow one, however, and we (of course) chat with Dellacamera about some of the more memorable “forgotten” stops made along the way, including:

• Talking his way into his professional debut calling local TV games for the 1978 NASL expansion Detroit Express;
• Handling radio play-by-play for the American Soccer League’s ALPO dog food-sponsored Pennsylvania Stoners;
• Parlaying years of minor league hockey broadcast experience into lead announcing duties for indoor soccer’s Pittsburgh Spirit of the fledgling MISL;
• Cementing his stature as the voice of US women’s soccer as the play-by-play lead for the 2001 launch of the WUSA; and   
• Returning to his first love of pro hockey – finally at the NHL level – with the short-lived Atlanta Thrashers.  

Our sponsors for this week include: Audible, Podfly and SportsHistoryCollectibles.com.