C8| Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
BOOKS
‘I come from Chi, I hardly try, / Just go to bat and fade and die. / Fortune’s coming my way...’—RING LARDNER, 1919
Eight Men Out: The Black Sox
and the 1919 World Series
By Eliot Asinof (1963)
1
The story of the Chicago “Black Sox,”
the baseball players who took money
from gamblers to lose the 1919 World
Series, has long assumed the contours
of a morality play about coarse, greedy
ballplayers. Eliot Asinof admirably brings
to light the human tragedy behind the
headlines. In “Eight Men Out,” White Sox
owner Charles Comiskey is portrayed as a
cheap tyrant who paid his players far less
than the going rate and made them play in
filthy uniforms to cut the club’s cleaning
bills, preferring to spend money wining and
dining sportswriters. Players had little
recourse, however, thanks to the “reserve”
clause in the standard contract that kept
them bound to their clubs in perpetuity.
Any player who quit his team wouldn’t be
able to find a job anywhere else in organized
baseball. In spirited, jaunty prose, Asinof
introduces a Runyonesque world of pool
halls, hotels and taverns filled with vivid
characters—none of them entirely on the
level. Most memorable among them perhaps
is Arnold Rothstein, mastermind of the
World Series fix, who, the author notes,
“recognized the corruption in American
society and made it his own.”
Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story
By David Wolf (1972)
2
Connie Hawkins was a schoolyard
legend in 1960s New York, possessed
of remarkable style and showmanship
and an almost superhuman leaping
ability. “For the true fan,” David Wolf writes,
seeing Hawkins play basketball for the first
time was “like discovering a lost Rembrandt
in the attic.” In his first year of college,
Hawkins received a $200 loan from a former
player named Jack Molinas, who was
subsequently arrested for fixing games.
After New York detectives interrogated
Hawkins, the forward was thrown out of
college, despite the lack of any evidence that
he had done anything illegal, and blacklisted
by the National Basketball Association.
For eight years—the prime of his basketball
life—he played with the Harlem Globe-
trotters and in the American Basketball
Association. In the end he would sue the
NBA and win a major settlement. “Foul!” is
far from a hagiographic sports biography.
It’s a tough and knowing look at the racial
politics and often dubiousfinancial practices
of big-time basketball.
spectacularly violent hits of the sort the NFL
had long glorified—it came from the routine
collisions of attacker and defender that are
the essence of the game, a fact entirely in
keeping with the answer Webster gave when
asked if he’d ever been in a car accident:
“Oh, probably about 25,000 times or so.”Cycle of Lies:
The Fall of Lance Armstrong
By Juliet Macur (2014)4
A New York Times reporter who
covered bicycle racing for years, Juliet
Macur was the ideal writer to chart a
rise and fall unparalleled in American
sports history. Her portrait of Lance Armstrong
is lucid and unsparing, with a novelistic
complexity. An extraordinary athlete, Mr.
Armstrong was willing to suffer for his triumphs
to a degree almost beyond comprehension;
he was also vain and greedy. He won seven
consecutive Tour de France titles, in part
thanks to the use of the banned drug
erythropoietin, which Mr. Armstrong fervently
denied. Having conquered metastatic testicular
cancer early in his career, Ms. Macur writes,“he had risen from his deathbed to a secular
sainthood.” Eventually, the truth came out, and
the empire quickly crumbled. Ms. Macur ends
her book with a striking image of the discredited
Mr. Armstrong, abandoned by his sponsors,
packing up and moving out of his Texas mansion.The Last Temptation of Rick Pitino
By Michael Sokolove (2018)5
Louisville University, writes Michael
Sokolove, “was an example of how to
build an institution of higher learning
out of an athletic program. Right up
until the moment when it became the
prototype of how the whole thing blows up.”
The college’s head coach of basketball, Rick
Pitino, a brash New Yorker, led the Louisville
Cardinals to an NCAA championship in 2013,
but was brought down by not just one, but
two, tawdry sex scandals. The more significant
scandal, though, as amply detailed by Mr.
Sokolove, is the corporatization of college
athletics, mostly through lucrative deals with
television networks and sneaker companies.
It’s a system awash with money—for everyone
but the players.Matthew Goodman
The author, most recently, of ‘The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team’
FIVE BESTSPORTS SCANDALS
League of Denial: The NFL,
Concussions, and the Battle for Truth
By Mark Fainaru-Wada and Steve Fainaru (2013)3
During his Hall of Fame career with
the Pittsburgh Steelers, “Iron” Mike
Webster was widely considered the
strongest man in the National Football
League. After retirement, Webster seemed
another person—one beset by confusion and
rage, who spiraled downward until his death
from a heart attack at the age of 50. “League
of Denial” views Webster’s fate as a lesson
in the peril of football-related concussions.
The book documents the ways in which the
NFL played down the facts about that peril
and the reports of independent researchers—
among them Bennet Omalu, a pathologist who
found in Webster’s brain a pathology he had
never before encountered in football players.
The discovery would come to be known
as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a
devastating condition that causes dementia,
depression and, sometimes, leads to suicide.
A colleague of Dr. Omalu’s suggested—only
half in jest—that the condition be called
dementia footballistica. Most troubling, the
damage didn’t seem to come mainly from theIMPACT PLAYEROffensive lineman Mike Webster of the Pittsburgh Steelers during a game at Three Rivers Stadium in December 1988.
GEORGE GOJKOVICH/GETTY IMAGESGreece
By Roderick Beaton
Chicago, 462 pages, $35
BYDAVIDMASON
E
ARLY INthe 1990s, with
war raging in the for-
mer Yugoslavia, a Greek
friend of mine was lec-
turing to an American
audience on his country’s sensitive
political position. Greek policy in the
Balkans, he emphasized, was based
on the idea of “border stability.”
Greeks had reason to be worried.
Their own borders had been fixed
only since 1947. A tiny country situ-
ated in a pivotal geopolitical position
between Europe and Asia Minor, with
cultural ties reaching in every direc-
tion and torn by its own internal con-
tradictions, Greece itself had grown
through successive wars. The first
new independent country in modern
Europe, established in 1830, it was
also the locus of an ancient culture of
profound meaning to the world. As
Roderick Beaton argues in “Greece,”
his splendid new book, “Greece and
the modern history of the Greek
nationmatter, far beyond the bounds
of the worldwide Greek community.”
Mr. Beaton calls his book a “biog-
raphy” rather than a “history.” Both
are Greek words, of course, remind-
ing readers how deeply the Greek
language has influenced us over three
millennia. He structures his narrative
as one might tell the life of a single
person, with chapters running from
“A Seed Is Sown” and “Born in
Blood” to “The Self Divided” and
“Coming of Age in Europe.” Europe,
too, is a Greek word, and the modern
country’s fraught relationship to that
protean entity lends Mr. Beaton’s
story an urgent relevance.
“We are all Greeks,” wrote the
poet Shelley in the first days of the
Greek War of Independence (1821-30).
Just as Greek contributions to litera-
ture, politics, history, philosophy, art
and science fertilized European and
American culture, the revolutions in
America and France would inspire
Greek intellectuals who conceived
of liberating their country from the
Ottoman Empire, which had ruled
them for 400 years.
But what defines a nation, and
who were these Greeks? Certainly not
a single ethnicity, even in ancient
times. Mr. Beaton quotes the poet
George Seferis’s speech upon winning
the Nobel Prize in 1963: “I do not say
we are of the same blood [as the
ancient Greeks]—because I have a
horror of racial theories—but we still
live in the same country and we see
the same mountains ending in the
sea.” The region is rich in irony:
Seferis was born an Ottoman subject
in Asia Minor, while the father of
modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal (later
Atatürk), was born in Thessaloniki,
now part of Greece. In the formation
of modern borders, millions of refu-
gees traded places. Mr. Beaton de-
scribes two identities in tension: the
Greek nation, loosely defined as peo-
ple who speak the language and share
other cultural characteristics, and the
Greek state, the political entity con-
structed and constantly adapted after- The nation is enduring, while
the state with its many governments
has changed nearly every decade,
forcing Greeks to adjust to its permu-
tations. Mr. Beaton quotes the histo-
rian Thanos Veremis on Greek atti-
tudes toward this fickle entity: “For
Greeks, unlike the concept of the
nation, the state had always been an
object of popular derision.”
Greeks have refined their stoic
humor through these wars and
ended after a Turkish assault on the
city of Smyrna (now Izmir) marked
by slaughter, mass deportations
and a fire (its cause debated) whose
effect “was to cleanse the city of
almost all visible signs of a Greek,
Christian and European presence that
went back centuries.”
Previous histories of modern
Greece by C.M. Woodhouse, Richard
Clogg and Thomas Gallant have got-
ten bogged down in this Balkan com-
plexity, but Mr. Beaton’s biographical
conceit keeps the narrative focused,
lively and clear. His accounts of the
Metaxas dictatorship (1936-41), the
Axis occupation and subsequent civil
war are both gripping and remark-
ably balanced. Historians have seen
the rise of the Communist Party in
Greece and its violent suppression,
with the help of Britain and the U.S.
under the Truman Doctrine, as the
start of the Cold War. But Mr. Beaton
allows that Greek communists were
not a monolithic force under Stalin’s
control. They were terrible, but they
represented a more local struggle
against fascism and monarchy.
Except for the junta years and the
occasional spasm of terrorist activity,
contemporary Greece has become
increasingly peaceful and prosperous
under relatively moderate govern-
ments, joining the European Union
in 1981 and adopting the euro in- The economic crisis of the past
decade has been devastating, to say
the least, but Mr. Beaton reminds us
that “Greeks have been here before.
Generations have lived through far
worse conditions in the two-hundred-
year history of the Greek state.”
The people who gave us the first
modern Olympic Games in 1896 con-
tinue to give us music, literature and
art of great beauty. The tragic vitality
of their story endures.
Mr. Mason’s latest books are
“Voices, Places: Essays” and “The
Sound: New and Selected Poems.”
He teaches at Colorado College.The Cradle
Of
Nationalism
changing governments, but have
rarely spoken with one voice. They
were intensely divided even when
they rose up against the Ottoman
Turks in 1821, a period Mr. Beaton
calls “a descent into savagery.” Early
Greek victories against the pasha, or
local Ottoman governor in the centralPeloponnese peninsula, resulted in
the wholesale slaughter of Muslims
and Jews, the eradication of villages,
heaps of severed heads. Once the
sultan’s troops had put down rebel-
lions in the northern provinces and
focused on the Peloponnese, they
swiftly matched atrocity for atrocity.
Only with the help of the Great
Powers England, France and Russia
did the Greeks finally prevail. Now
“Greece existed as a political entity
on the map of Europe.” But defeating
the Turks meant contending with
themselves. The first governor of thenew state, Ioánnis Kapodístrias, an
aristocratic modernizer with ties to
Europe, was assassinated by rival
Greeks in 1831. “Born in blood,”
indeed.
The Great Powers imposed a
Bavarian monarch, Otto, upon the
fledgling country, and when he was
forced out by advocates of parlia-
mentary rule in 1862, a new king was
imported from Denmark to form a
constitutional monarchy. Though
occasionally compromised or out of
favor, the monarchy survived until
the military junta of 1967-74. In 1913
King George I was assassinated in
Thessaloniki, a city recently acquired
via the Balkan Wars. During World
War I, the new king, Constantine,
argued for restraint—after all, those
other warring monarchs were his
relatives. But Greece’s charismatic
prime minister, Elefthérios Venizélos,
had already been negotiating with
Britain to join the war effort. Un-
fortunately, Venizélos also advocated
the sentimental “Grand Idea,” a no-
tion that Greece might regain its lost
territory in Asia Minor, and laid the
groundwork for an invasion of Turkey
in 1921. Greeks marching toward their
symbolic city, Constantinople, ran
up against the new Turkish army
under the future Atatürk. The conflictMICHAEL FREEMAN/GETTY IMAGES
MONUMENTALCentral Athens and the Acropolis.Independent since 1830,
Greece has worked
to forge a modern
identity in the shadow
of its glorious past.