EPISODE 323: Play-By-Play Pioneer Marty Glickman - With Jeffrey Gurock

It's an episode that's hopefully as "Good! Like Nedicks!" - as we take a biographical look back at the rich and influential life of pioneering New York City sports broadcaster Marty Glickman - with biographer/Yeshiva University history professor Jeffrey Gurock ("Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend").

From the "Marty Glickman" dustjacket:

"For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. From the 1940s through the 1990s, he was as iconic a sports figure in town as the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, or the Jets’ Joe Namath. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today’s most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. To this very day, many fans who grew up listening to his coverage of Knicks basketball and Giants football games, among the myriad of events that Glickman covered, recall fondly, and can still recite, his descriptions of actions in arenas and stadiums.

"In addition to the stories of how he became a master of American sports airwaves, Marty Glickman has also been remembered as a Jewish athlete who, a decade before he sat in front of a microphone, was cynically barred from running in a signature track event in the 1936 Olympics by anti-Semitic American Olympic officials. This lively biography details this traumatic event and explores not only how he coped for decades with that painful rejection but also examines how he dealt with other anti-Semitic and cultural obstacles that threatened to stymie his career. Glickman’s story underscores the complexities that faced his generation of American Jews as these children of immigrants emerged from their ethnic cocoons and strove to succeed in America amid challenges to their professional and social advancement."

          

Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend -  buy book here

Glickman -  buy DVD here

Sports on New York Radio: A Play-By-Play History -  buy book here

EPISODE 257: New York's Shea Stadium - With Matthew Silverman

It's the 60th year of New York Mets baseball, and we celebrate this week with a look back at the transformational multipurpose facility they called home for 45 seasons - including three of the club's four NL pennants and its only two World Series championships - Shea Stadium.

Matthew Silverman (Shea Stadium Remembered: The Mets, The Jets, and Beatlemania) takes us back to the origin story behind the conceptually named "Flushing Meadow Park Municipal Stadium" - which began almost immediately after the Dodgers' and Giants' relocation to California in 1958 as a lure for a new expansion franchise to replace them.

Through the combined political efforts of New York City mayor Robert Wagner, city urban planning power broker Robert Moses, and Continental League founder (and future stadium namesake) William Shea, the Queens-based facility opened in 1964 as the mutual home of not only the NL expansion Mets, but also the newly reincarnated AFL football New York Jets (née Titans).

We delve into more than four decades of Shea memories, including the 1969 "Miracle Mets," the Jets' 1968 AFL Championship, Bill Buckner's ill-fated error in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series, and the insane year of 1975 - when the AL Yankees and football Giants also called the stadium home.

And, of course, the iconic first stop on the Beatles' 1965 tour of North America - the biggest-ever grossing concert of the era that became synonymous with "Beatlemania."

Shea Stadium Remembered: The Mets, The Jets, and Beatlemania - buy book here

EPISODE #114: New York's Polo Grounds - With Stew Thornley

We cap off the long Memorial Day holiday weekend with a look back at one of the New York metropolitan area’s most memorable sports stadiums of yore – the Polo Grounds – with author and Minnesota Twins official scorer Stew Thornley (The Polo Grounds: Essays and Memories of New York City's Historic Ballpark, 1880-1963).

The “Polo Grounds” was actually the name of multiple structures across upper Manhattan during its history.  As its name suggests, the original venue (1876-1889) was built for, well, polo.  Located between Fifth and Sixth (Lenox) Avenues just north of Central Park, it was converted to a baseball stadium in 1880, soon becoming home to the city’s first major league pro teams – the Metropolitans of the American Association and the Gothams (later, Giants) of the National League.

Pushed out by a re-gridding of the borough in 1889, the Giants relocated northward to what became the second incarnation of the park in the Coogan’s Hollow section of Washington Heights in 1890.  Coincidentally, it was also the year that most of the team’s best players bolted to the upstart Players’ League – also called the Giants, playing in their own new (and larger) stadium (called Brotherhood Park) right next door. 

When the PL folded at the end of the season, the recombined NL Giants moved over to Brotherhood Park, rechristening it the “Polo Grounds.”  This third version – later renovated after a fire in 1911 (technically becoming the stadium’s fourth version) – became the structure most remembered by long-time baseball fans, especially for its distinctive “bathtub” shape, very short distances to the left and right field walls, and unusually deep center field.

While synonymous with the history of baseball’s Giants (including Bobby Thompson’s 1951 historic playoff “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” and Willie Mays’ dramatic over-the-shoulder catch during the team’s 1954 World Series run), the Polo Grounds was also home to the New York Yankees from 1913-1922 – and the first two seasons of the NL expansion New York Mets from 1962-63, while waiting for the new Shea Stadium in Queens to be completed.

The Polo Grounds was also the center of New York’s burgeoning professional football scene – notably the National Football League’s New York Giants from 1925-55 – but also the NFL’s oft-forgotten Brickley Giants (1922) and Bulldogs (1949).  

In later years, it also became the temporary home of the fledgling American Football League’s New York Titans from 1960-62, and the renamed “Jets” in 1963 – including the last-ever sporting event to be played there – a late-season (and typical) loss to the Buffalo Bills on December 14, 1963, in front of only 6,526 diehards.

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The Polo Grounds: Essays and Memories of New York City’s Historic Ballpark, 1880-1963 - buy here

EPISODE #88: The 1968-69 AFL New York Jets – With Bob Lederer

On January 12, 1969, the American Football League champion New York Jets stunned the sports world when they beat their heavily favored NFL title-winning counterparts the Baltimore Colts to win the third annual “AFL–NFL World Championship Game” – today remembered as version III of the “Super Bowl.”

The key to the Jets’ ultimate success, of course, was superstar quarterback Joe Namath – whose talent, confidence and charm had already made him an instant celebrity when he first arrived on the Gotham sports scene in 1965.  But the rise of the former (and by the end of its third season in 1962, insolvent) New York Titans to the top of the pro football heap was far from a solo effort.

Author Bob Lederer (Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl Team That Changed Football) joins host Tim Hanlon to discuss the decade-long saga of the Jets’ remarkable evolution from a mediocre team in a dilapidated stadium in an oft-derided "Mickey Mouse" league, to a franchise that literally saved the AFL from itself and vaulted a newly merged NFL into the modern era of pro football.

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Beyond Broadway Joe: The Super Bowl Team That Changed Football - buy here

EPISODE #87: New York’s Shea Stadium’s Curious 1975 – With Brett Topel

It was, unwittingly, the center of the New York professional sports universe in 1975.

The official home of both Major League Baseball’s Mets and AFL-then-NFL football’s Jets since 1964, Shea Stadium was always a busy venue.  But when the football Giants and baseball Yankees found themselves displaced by extensive renovations to their shared Bronx home of Yankee Stadium, Shea instantly became Mecca for Gotham sports fans – hosting all four teams over the course of their respective 1975 seasons. 

The Giants, of course, had already started their wayward journey away from the Bronx in 1973, when plans were announced for a brand new, state-of-the art facility in the Meadowlands of East Rutherford, New Jersey to open in time for Big Blue’s 1976 season.  After two miserable seasons at New Haven, Connecticut’s Yale Bowl (winning only one of 12 games there), the Giants were wooed by New York mayor Abe Beame to play one last season back inside the city limits before absconding for good across the Hudson.

The Yankees, meanwhile, set up temporary shop at Shea beginning in the spring of 1974 – the first of two seasons the Bronx Bombers would play “home” games there while awaiting their new digs, also to open in 1976. 

Thus, for one crazy 1975 season, all four New York teams – the Mets, Jets, Yankees, and Giants – called Shea Stadium home.  Four teams, 175 games, 3,738,546 fans, and one stadium – the only time in professional sports history that two baseball teams and two football teams shared the same facility in the same year.

Brett Topel (When Shea Was Home: The Story of the 1975 Mets, Yankees, Giants, and Jets) joins the pod to discuss the highlights – but mostly lowlights – of one of the oddest years in New York City sports history.

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When Shea Was Home: The Story of the 1975 Mets, Yankees, Giants, and Jets - buy here

New Era NFL New York Giants 1975 Historic Baycik 9Fifty Snapback Cap - buy here

EPISODE #59: Pro Soccer’s Dean of Media Relations, Jim Trecker

With a career spanning more than four decades, the National Soccer Hall of Fame’s 2017 Colin Jose Media Award-winner Jim Trecker has been part of the American sports media relations landscape since the late 1960’s.  After a chance part-time undergrad job in Columbia University’s modest sports information department, Trecker traded his initial career ambitions in French language education for what ultimately became an unmatched professional journey in public relations at the highest levels of international sports.

After cutting his PR teeth with various post-grad pro sports gigs around New York (including work for the Madison Square Garden-owned New York Skyliners [actually Uruguay’s C.A. Cerro] of the 1967 United Soccer Association), Trecker helped manage media relations for the “Broadway” Joe Namath-era AFL-then-NFL New York Jets – a whirling dervish of major league sports information management that transfixed both the Gotham and national press corps, especially in the wake of a surprising Super Bowl III championship.

But it was the arrival of international soccer superstar Pelé to the fledgling New York Cosmos in 1975 that ultimately took Trecker – and the steeply ascendant North American Soccer League – into a stratospheric professional orbit, as the increasingly star-studded team, league and sport exploded onto the local, national and global sports scenes during the latter half of the decade.  Soccer’s first true international “super club,” the Cosmos became nothing short of an international sports and cultural phenomenon, and Trecker’s job was to manage all of the media’s intense interest in everything related to them – no easy feat.

Trecker joins host Tim Hanlon to recount some of the most memorable events during the heyday of the Cosmos, as well as his subsequent PR leadership roles with the NASL’s Washington Diplomats, the league office itself, and his mega role as head of media relations for the wildly successful USA-hosted 1994 World Cup.  PLUS: we discuss Trecker’s role behind the upcoming NASL 50th Anniversary, to be held in conjunction with the re-launch of the National Soccer Hall of Fame in Frisco, TX on October 16-18, 2018!

Thanks to Audible, SportsHistoryCollectibles.com and Podfly for their support of the show!

EPISODE #23: The AFL’s New York Titans with Author Bill Ryczek

Before the modern-day New York Jets of today’s NFL – before Joe Namath, before the infamous “Heidi Game,” before the guaranteed Super Bowl III victory – there were the New York Titans.  A charter member of the upstart American Football League in 1960, the underfunded Titans played for three seasons to meager crowds in Upper Manhattan’s decrepit Polo Grounds, flirting with bankruptcy and collapse from virtually day one.  Author/historian Bill Ryczek (Crash of the Titans: The Early Years of the New York Jets and the AFL) joins Tim Hanlon to discuss the Jets’ ignominious beginnings as the Titans, including notable performances by:

• Owner Harry Wismer, the volatile sportscaster with a talent for hustling, a penchant for drinking, and a habit of bouncing paychecks;

• Head coach Sammy Baugh, the prescient hall-of-fame player who refused to show up for a press conference announcing his signing until he was paid his full salary in advance – and in cash;

• Successor (and first-time) head coach Clyde "Bulldog" Turner, who inherited a dispirited squad weary of uncertain finances, inadequate publicity, and front office instability;

• AFL commissioner Joe Foss, the constant Wismer foe, whose tolerance was tested until ultimately pushed to seize control of the franchise; AND

• William Shea, the New York attorney whose dream for a Continental League baseball franchise in a newly-constructed Flushing Stadium materialized too late to save Wismer’s foundering Titans, but eventually catalyzed the re-born Jets.

This week’s episode is sponsored by Audible and Podfly!

Crash of the Titans: The Team that Became the New York Jets - buy paperback edition here

Crash of the Titans: The Team that Became the New York Jets - buy hardcover edition here

Crash of the Titans: The Team that Became the New York Jets - buy Kindle digital edition here