The SportsThink Weekly Review #55
August 20, 2021
Hello and welcome to the fifty-fifth edition of the Weekly Review! Less content than usual this week, owing to lack of reading time as I gear up for the fall semester. (yes, it comes at the same time every year. yes, I am somehow always scrambling when it does.)
On to the content!
Inside the Lines: My Favorite Sports Reads of The Week
It’s time for the Little League World Series, which is unfortunately a US-only affair this year on account of the pandemic. I think this timeline of 50 great moments in LLWS history from Baseball America is pretty neat.
Inside the Disputed, Uninspired, and Journalistic Origins of College Mascots, by Andy Wittry, via his Out of Bounds newsletter. This newsletter is consistently good and has become one I look forward to every week. A bit of fun in this edition, looking at college mascots on the eve of another football season. Good stories and trivia throughout. If I may offer one more nugget, Wittry could add the Texas Longhorns to his list of names/mascots bestowed upon teams by journalists. Student reporter D.A. Frank coined the nickname in 1903, although it took about a decade to really stick. (And, if you feel the need to go deep on the early history of Texas football, here’s a chronicle of the 1910 season I wrote some years back.)
The New York Times has a novel summer sports project that’s pretty cool: giving writers 900 words and a theme (‘freedom’) and letting them run with it. I quite enjoyed this soccer story by Charles McNair, but they are all pretty good. I can’t find a link to a page with all of them, but if you click on that one, you can find the others at the bottom of the page (so, I guess that’s a link to all of them??).
Syllabus time means revisiting some mainstays and I inevitably re-read a classic or two. Here’s the late, great David Foster Wallace on Roger Federer. Have I shared this in previous newsletters? Yes. Maybe twice or three times. Should you read it or re-read it? Probably yes.
Tweet of the Week
The second one really does it for me.
Non-Sports Reads
As always, thank you for reading. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re having trouble accessing any articles, happy to send them directly your way. And, if you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider sharing it with someone else who might like it.
See you next week,
Tolga