It is September, a wonderful time to be a sports fan, and in this review, we will look at three new books that capture the wide variety of sports that people enjoy: SEC Football: How a Regional League Became a National Obsession, by Colby Newton; F1 Racing Confidential: Inside Stories from the World of Formula One, by Giles Richards; and The Promise of Women's Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science, by Malissa Smith.
SEC Football: How a Regional League Became a National Obsession
By Colby Newton
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 204 pages; hardback, $34.00; eBook, $32.00
Colby Newton owned and operated collegefootballwire.com from 2001-04, and was its editor and senior writer. He then worked in the college bowl industry for 14 years, and in 2019, he founded an analytics company that supplies data to clients that include Baylor and Virginia, as well as plenty of Division II and Div. III schools.
In the fascinating new book, SEC Football: How a Regional League Became a National Obsession, Newton delivers a compelling history of the Southeastern Conference, and how it had an 80-year journey that saw it evolve from a regional league into the most dominant conference in college football.
The SEC had humble origins, as it was born in a Knoxville hotel in 1932 after it split from another league. It was built by southern gridiron pioneers who believed football could bring prominence and prestige back to the region, and there were important achievements along the way to its unprecedented success.
There were early dynasties at Alabama and Tennessee, and the coaches have been legendary, from Bear Bryant, General Robert Neyland, and Shug Jordan up to the current era with Nick Saban and Steve Spurrier. The conference has also featured Heisman winners including Herschel Walker and Bo Jackson.
The SEC has also had plenty of significant moments along the way, including when the rosters were integrated, a momentous lawsuit against the NCAA, conference expansion, and the SEC's historic contract with CBS.
In this excerpt, Newton writes of the sport's significance to its home region: "The heartbeat of college football is in the South. Nowhere else is the passion and pageantry greater. But the game so many Americans love and so many in the South proclaim as their religion was actually born in the Northeast. In the years immediately following the Civil War, the first schools to field teams were part of the so-called Ivy League. The very first college football game took place in New Jersey in 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers. The first Coach to earn national acclaim and who is now recognized as the father of American football, Walter Camp, coached at Yale, located in New Haven, Connecticut.
As the sport increased in popularity in the late 1880s, it also increased in geography as more schools began to field teams. In the early twentieth century, the University of Michigan, coached by Fielding H. Yost, and the University of Chicago, coached by Amos Alonzo Stagg, rose to national prominence. The University of Pittsburgh, led by coach Glenn 'Pop' Warner, won 30 consecutive games between 1915 and 1918. A few years later, a little-known Catholic school in northern Indiana took the college football world by storm. Knute Rockne and his Notre Dame Fighting Irish won three national titles in the early 1920s and became known for their barnstorming ways, playing any team, anywhere.
Going as far back as 1869, national championships in college football were handed out by various organizations whose members voted on which team deserved the honor or by a mathematical formula that had been devised. At times, as many as six schools per season lay claim to the national championship, with many of those titles awarded retroactively. From 1869 through the 1924 season, 120 national champions were crowned. Only seven of those titles went to teams in the South: LSU (1908), Auburn (1913), Georgia Tech - notably coached by John Heisman (1916, 1917), Georgia (1920), and Vanderbilt (1921, 1922).
As college football passed its fiftieth anniversary, schools in the South were given little respect when compared to their counterparts in the North and the Midwest. In order for that perception to change, a team would need to emerge not only as a dominant program regionally but also as one that would compete on the national stage.
Enter the University of Alabama...
Alabama was named the national champions in 1925 and followed that magical campaign with another unbeaten season and a trip to he Rose Bowl in 1927. They tied powerful Stanford, 7-7, in the game but did enough to be named the national champions again. Just four years after arriving as the head coach, Wallace Wade won consecutive national titles. It would be the first of four times Alabama would accomplish the feat."
F1 Racing Confidential: Inside Stories from the World of Formula One
By Giles Richards
Grand Central Publishing; hardcover, 304 pages; $32.00
Giles Richards has been a journalist at The Guardian and The Observer for over 20 years. He is a lifelong fan of motor racing who has covered Formula One for more than a decade, covering a sport that has always fascinated him.
F1 Racing Confidential: Inside Stories from the World of Formula One is Richards' new book, and it is an all-access look into the inner workings of this glamorous motorsport that is massively popular all over the world. It has grown in popularity immeasurably in the United States due to the Netflix documentary "Drive to Survive."
Formula One is one of the most intense, complex, and secretive sports on the planet, and Richards draws on his experience working at the heart of Formula One to deliver this behind-the-scenes look at the complete workings of one a modern F1 team. Richards makes sure to explain what each role is on a team, so if this is your first time reading about it, you will understand the technical complexity of this sport.
There are exclusive interviews with men and women who work at ever level of F1 teams, including Mercedes, Red Bull, Ferrari, McLaren, Alfa Romeo, and Aston Martin. Contributions also come from high-profile insiders, including Christian Horner, Lando Norris, and Toto Wolff, who each give their own compelling stories, insights, and revelations.
In this excerpt, Richards writes of his love for F1: "There are moments surely for us all that remain indelibly etched in memory. For me, one was watching F1 in the mid to late 1970s as a six-year-old. Races coming in highlight form from impossibly exotic places; Brazil, yes, but also, well, Spain and Germany. At the time there were three TV channels and going to France was considered a major foreign trip. When James Hunt won the title at Fuji in Japan in 1976, he might well have won it on the moon as far as I was concerned. I knew Japan existed. The idea of ever going there was almost absurd.
After each race had concluded I would immediately try and recreate a new one using toy cars, a circuit defined by pieces of wooden toy train tracks and a die, each roll allocating a movement distance to the competitors based on their length. Roll a six and you moved six car lengths.
That the cars involved would vary from a little Mini Cooper to some extreme drag raving monster was irrelevant. On the carpet were toy cars of every size and shape. I recall Muttley and Dick Dastardly's car from Wacky Races was in there, which the FIA would doubtless have had issues with, but it didn't matter because in my mind it was F1 in all its glorious, exotic beauty.
The winner - and there never was a winner because bedtime always interrupted an absolutely classic battle and the track and competitors were back in the toy box by the next day - was irrelevant. What mattered was the racing and that was what I loved about F1.
Those moments have stayed with me ever since and they're one reason why this book exists. The fascination I felt then never really left me; some things never do. I remember with equal clarity my first gig. The Damned at Portsmouth Guildhall on 14 June 1985. It too is seared in my brain - the noise, the sweat from a heaving crowd in front of the stage. I left with ears ringing and a lifelong love of music that has remained a constant, alongside F1."
The Promise of Women's Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science
By Malissa Smith
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 292 pages; hardback, $36.00; eBook, $34.00
Malissa Smith is the founding board member of the IWBHF and an elector for the IBHOF. She trains at Gleason's Gym and writes for her blog, www.Girlboxing.com, and is a member of The Ring's women's ratings panel. Smith has authored A History of Women's Boxing, the first comprehensive narrative of the sport that The Ring called "The Bible of Women's Boxing."
In the engrossing new book, The Promise of Women's Boxing: A Momentous New Era for the Sweet Science, Smith details the rise of the sport from the 2012 Olympics through the true "million-dollar baby" women's super-fights of 2022.
One of those fights is pictured on the cover of this book, and should be memorable to New Yorkers. Madison Square Garden hosted the first of these super-fights, a battle between Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano on April 30, 2022. The unprecedented fight drew a sellout crowd at The Garden and the fight drew 1.5 million views all over the world through online streaming.
The fight was historic, and Smith reveals that it really was much more than people could have conceived, as it was the culmination of a three-centuries arc of women's boxing history. Women fought as prize fighters since the 1720s, with the most famous fight in London at Figg's Amphitheater, which was also known as the Boarded House, near the old Oxford Road, and also at Hockley in the Hole in Clerkenwell Green, which was a stalwart of sport and gambling in Georgian England.
Nearly six months later, Claressa Shields, a two-time Olympic gold medalist and three-time undisputed champion, battled Savannah Marshall, a 12-0 professional fighter who had the distinction of being the only person ever to have defeated Shields, back in 2012 when they fought as amateurs at the women's world tournament.
Smith writes, "Shields and Marshall were fighting at the head of an unprecedented all-female eleven-fight card in front of the sold-out crowd of twenty thousand adoring fans. Broadcast worldwide on Britain's Sky Sports to over 150 countries and in the United States on the ESPN+ streaming service, the promoter for the event, BOXXER announced an astounding two million plus viewers.
"The Taylor-Serrano and Marshall-Shields cards are in a direct lineage to women's boxing's first-ever inclusion in the Olympics at the London Games of 2012. In the games, women demonstrated an elite level of skills on par with their male counterparts in a sport that had otherwise excluded them from amateur athletic competition as little as ten years before in some nations. As a demarcation point, however, the standard of excellence was a gauntlet in the long, three-century arc of women's boxing history. A history fraught with highs and lows, periods of absences and flurries of participation and interest, and always imbued with the heart and great promise of the women who fought."
Smith reveals stories that focus on boxing stars new and old, important battles, and the challenges women still face in boxing. She examines the sport on a global basis, the transition amateur boxers make to the pros, the impact online streaming has had on the sport, the challenges boxing faces from MMA, and the gains women have made in the super-fight era with extraordinary seven-figure opportunities for elite female stars.
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