[A dip into the archives for a one of our first-ever episodes from 2017 - by request!] Author Matt Algeo (Last Team Standing: How the Steelers and the Eagles – "The Steagles" – Saved Pro Football During World War II) joins Tim Hanlon all the way from Maputo, Mozambique to discuss the marriage of convenience that literally saved the National Football League from collapse in 1943. Algeo describes how a desperate Art Rooney scrambled to save his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise, depleted by wartime military call-ups; how a hastily assembled squad of ragtag draft rejects practiced football at night w ..read more

Former ESPN ad researcher, and current Elon University professor of communications and sport management David Bockino (Game On: How Sports Media Grew Up, Sold Out, and Got Personal with Billions of Fans) helps us trace the evolution of the sports media industry - with historical points of interest both obvious (e.g., the 1958 NFL Championship Game; "Sports Illustrated" magazine; ABC's "Monday Night Football;" the 1979 launch of cable's ESPN); and subtle (1967's live multinational "Our World" TV broadcast; World Series Cricket; 1981's short-lived Enterprise Radio Network; AudioNet/Broadcast.com ..read more

We reach back into the vaunted Good Seats library stacks this week for a deep dive into one of Tim's favorite sports reference books - Roadside Baseball: The Locations of America's Baseball Landmarks - with its (prodigious non-fiction) author Chris Epting.   Now in its third edition, Roadside is everything you'd imagine from the title: a detailed, geographic cataloging of over 500 important events in North American baseball history, including historical data, trivia, photographs, and lore - highlighting birthplaces of baseball legends, ballparks, museums and halls of fame, final resting p ..read more

Sharing something special, an episode of the new podcast "Ways to Win" - where coaches Craig Robinson and John Calipari use their on-court wisdom to solve off-court problems. In this first episode (recorded before the start of the NCAA basketball tournament!), there's no better way to kick off March Madness than with President Barack Obama (and Craig’s favorite brother-in-law), who drops by to break down his bracket. Find out who’s in his Final Four and how far he thinks Coach Cal’s Wildcats will go (even if Cal doesn't want to know). Plus, the guys chat about how Cal's preparing his players f ..read more

We bust some brackets this week in honor of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, with a look back at the old East Coast Athletic Conference and the coaching cradle of city of Boston - with return (Episode 237) guest Clayton Trutor ("Boston Ball: Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun, Gary Williams, and the Forgotten Cradle of Basketball Coaches").   Before the formation of the original Big East Conference in 1979, much of DI college basketball in the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic was part of a loose patchwork of small conferences and independents that collectively fed into the not-really-a ..read more

We squint hard this week for a look into the story of American "professional" wrestling's formative years - with pop culture writer Jon Langmead (Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling).   Langmead takes us inside the raucous period roughly between the mid-1870s to the early-1940s - where genuine competitive wrestlers and opportunistic amusement-minded promoters (both heavily influenced by the country's booming carnival circuit) together codified the now modern-day conventions that transformed a legitimate, physically demanding sport into ..read more

Harper's Contributing Editor and novelist/historian extraordinaire Kevin Baker ("The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City") brings his blended affection for (and evocative portrayals of) both "The Big Apple" and the "National Pastime" - to make a compelling case for New York City as the rightful center of the baseball universe. From Alan Moores' review in Booklist:   "Baseball fans beyond Gotham’s gravitational pull might bristle at the notion that New York was the epicenter of the creation and growth of the game. But Baker’s raucous, revelatory, lovingly detailed accou ..read more

It's a celebration of women's hoops this week, as we look back at the "early days" of the Women's National Basketball Association - including stops with the oft-forgotten Utah Starzz and San Antonio Silver Stars - with three-time league all-star Marie Ferdinand-Harris (Transformed: The Winning Side of Losing).   A first-round pick in the WNBA's fifth-ever draft in 2001, Ferdinand was a dominant shooting guard at LSU prior to her 8th-overall selection by Utah - a formidable presence inside the paint and outside the arc, skills honed from leading title-winning teams at Edison High School, i ..read more

It's a "retcon" special this week, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of the most colorful and persistent franchises in American pro soccer history - with a return visit from Episode 40 guest Gary Singh (The Unforgettable San Jose Earthquakes: Momentous Stories On & Off the Field). As one of four West Coast expansion teams (along with the Los Angeles Aztecs, Seattle Sounders and Vancouver Whitecaps) added for the North American Soccer League’s breakthrough 1974 season, the original San Jose Earthquakes were an immediate hit both on the field (finishing second in an all-new Western ..read more

Veteran Minnesota sportswriter Kevin Allenspach (Mirage of Destiny: The Story of the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars) takes to the ice with us this week, as we look back at one of the most improbable playoff runs in NHL history - one that came the closest to giving the self-professed "State of Hockey" its first Stanley Cup championship - a title that still eludes the region to this day. Throughout much of the 1990-91 season, the Minnesota North Stars were among the worst-performing clubs in the National Hockey League - and dead last at the box office. Rumors of the team's possible sale to new ow ..read more