Researchers' Weekend in the Steel City

I joined a group of my fellow football researchers for a get-together in Pittsburgh this past weekend. Most were members of the Pro Football Researchers Association (PFRA), but it wasn't an official gathering. Friday night we all went to dinner and then screened the film "Leatherheads." The next morning, we gathered in a conference room to talk about the projects we were each working on and how we could help each other. Ken Crippen and Andy Piascik spoke about their efforts to track down and interview all of the surviving players from the All-America Football Conference. It's a daunting task, and time is running out. Most of the men who played in this league (which ran from 1946-1949) are in their eighties.

(Note: We're still trying to track down 12 AAFC players, and as far as we can tell they're all still alive. They are: Ezzret "Sugarfoot" Anderson, Robert Francis "Bob" Callahan, Norman Lawrence "Norm" Cox, Raymond L. "Ray" Evans, Paul Edward Gibson, Richard H. "Dick" Handley, Joe Winfred Morgan, John Puckett North, James C. Summer "Jim" O'Neal, Dewey Michael Proctor, Prince Arthur Scott, Linwood Bookard "Lin" Sexton, Gaylon Wesley Smith, Robert Lee "Bob" Sneddon, Robert Porter "Buddy" Tinsley, Jr., and Jack Gressert "Tex" Williams. If you have any info on their whereabouts or would like to help the effort, please contact me. )

T.J. Troup, who served as a technical advisor on "Leatherheads", shared stories about working with George Clooney and teaching the cast how to play football like they did back in 1925. Denis Crawford talked about his experiences writing his book on the 1979 Buccaneers called "McKay's Men." And we spent a fair amount of time just talking football. I wish more members had turned out, but those of us who were there had a lot of fun. I drove up to Canton on Sunday and spent a couple of hours at the Pro Football Hall of Fame. They've added a lot of interactive exhibits since I was last there, particularly in the Hall itself. Large touchscreen monitors let you call up and view a highlight film of any inductee. One of the newer exhibits in the museum honored those players who had served in the armed forces during wartime. no matter how many times I go, I always come away feeling like I've seen something new.

Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Peter Lovenheim, a writer who loves across town from me, posed an intersting question in his NY Times article yesterday.

Why is it that in an age of cheap long-distance rates, discount airlines and the Internet, when we can create community anywhere, we often don’t know the people who live next door?

After tragedy struck a family on his street, he was disappointed to realize that he didn't really know anything about his neighbors. And he was a little dismayed to learn that the same held true for the other folks on his block. He vowed to rectify that, to make a concious effort to get to know each and every person on his street.

I think his observations ring true. We've become more isolated, less connected to the people around us. It's easy to chat online with people around the world, but why is it so hard to have a conversation with people who live down the street, with people who spend their lives just a few yards away?

High Court Upholds Right to Use Sports Data

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck a blow against Major League Baseball and the Players Association in their heavy handed efforts to assert control over the use of baseball statistics. The two entities had argued that they owned the rights to the use of their playing statistics, and that companies who used them to run fantasy baseball leagues had to pay a licensing fee. A lower court had ruled against MLB, and by refusing to hear an appeal, the Supreme Court upheld that ruling.

The Court has already ruled pretty clearly on the central issue in this case: that factual information could not be protected by copyright. That 1991 decision (Feist v Rural Telephone) was fought between the publishers of competing phone books, but it has made a major impact in the field of sport reference publishing. It's made it possible for me to publish the kinds of books and websites I've worked on for the past decade, and it's helped spawn all kinds of great new research by making the raw data more widely available.

W.C. Heinz: 1915-2008

One of the all-time great sportswriters died yesterday. W.C. Heinz was 93, and a name that probably wasn't known to most folks younger than forty. He cut his teeth as a war correspondent, where he witnessed the D-Day invasion and shared a typewriter with his friend Ernest Hemingway. When the war ended, he went to work for the New York Sun covering baseball, boxing, and horse racing. He invented a new genre when he immersed himself with the Green Bay Packers in 1962, producing a detailed account of a week in the football life of coach Vince Lombardi. This style, later called "new journalism," shaped a whole generation of writers, from Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese to George Plimpton and John Feinstein.

Heinz also wrote the classic boxing book "The Professional" and, under the pseudonym Richard Hooker, wrote the novel "M*A*S*H*," later made into both a film and a television series.

Some of the tributes and obituaries which have appeared today do a better job of describing the importance of his work and the place he holds among 2oth century writers than I could. (thanks to my friend Greg Spira for passing some of these along.)

• New York Times


• Los Angeles Times


• Sports Illustrated feature story from 2000


• Hunstville Times


• Burlington Free Press

Tough Week for Sportswriters

Super Bowl week is generally pretty fun for sportswriters. The weather is usually pretty warm, there's almost no real news to report, and the whole scene is like one big party with a who's who of the football world. This year, however, the trip to the big game turned into a trip to the hospital for three prominent football writers.

It stared on Monday with Michael Wilbon, longtime columnist for the Washington Post and co-host of ESPN's daily sports-talk show, Pardon the Interruption. After complaining of chest pains, his wife drove him to a Scottsdale hospital, where he learned that he had suffered a mild heart attack.

After participating in the vote for the 2008 Hall of Fame class Saturday morning, ESPN's Len Pasquarelli checked into a local hospital and learned that he had five blocked arteries. He underwent quintuple bypass surgery on Super Bowl Sunday.

That same morning, Sports Illustrated's Peter King was in the emergency department at Good Samaritan Medical Center receiving treatment for what he described as "a nasty fever and bug."

Get well guys.