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The Bibliophile

A book about your favorite sport can provide a broader perspective than reading the sports section or watching the highlights.

Gods at Play: An Eyewitness Account of Great Moments in American Sports, by Tom Callahan, 304 pages, W.W. Norton & Company paperback, 2022

Enjoy a yarn or two from this spellbinding raconteur’s stories about yesteryear’s sports icons and hangers-on. Baltimore native Tom Callahan compiles fascinating behind-the-scenes accounts of the athletes he covered during his years as sports reporter and columnist for the Washington Post, Time magazine and other periodicals.

Gods at Play is a wide-ranging anthology. A chapter is devoted to athletes in each of these sports: basketball, football, baseball, boxing, hockey, horse racing, golf, tennis, the Olympics and auto racing.

Callahan covered luminaries whom older adults will fondly remember — Bill Russell, Joe Montana, Johnny Bench and Muhammad Ali, to name a few.

Many of his sketches reveal flawed personalities, surprising human frailties and deep-seeded vulnerabilities. Local sports fans will enjoy reading about Washington football during the Jurgensen era.

Septuagenarian Callahan moved back north to Reston, Virginia, from St. Augustine, Florida, to be near his grandchildren.

Breaking Through the Line: Bobby Marshall, the N.F.L.’s First African-American Player, by Terry McConnell, 220 pages, Nodin Press paperback, 2021

The achievements of Bobby Marshall, who broke myriad racial barriers, have long been forgotten.

Marshall, an athlete who excelled in multiple sports, was a force for racial harmony as a civic-minded attorney and civil servant whose public involvement was exemplary. Breaking Through the Line describes Marshall’s life and times in the upper Midwest.

In the first decade of the 20th century, Marshall accomplished many historic firsts: first Black player in what would become the NFL, the first Black man in the Big Ten, the first Black Big Ten coach, probably the first Black professional ice hockey player, the first Black professional quarterback and head coach, the first Black high school, college and pro football coach in Minnesota, and the first Black person to graduate from the University of Minnesota Law School.

Marshall was the only Black player on several professional baseball teams. He served as coach, player-captain and general manager of a Minnesota all-Black professional baseball team, which preceded the Negro Leagues and competed against all-white teams.

Marshall continued to play pro baseball until he was 60 and pro softball for another five years. He died in 1958 at the age of 78.

Septuagenarian author McConnell was school librarian, track and cross-country coach at Mount Vernon High School in Alexandria, Virginia. He is the grandson of O. C. Olsen, general manager of the Minneapolis Deans, the football team where Marshall served as player-coach.

Half of the author’s royalties are donated to the Bobby Marshall Scholarship Fund, which benefits student-athletes at the University of Minnesota who embody excellence in academics, leadership and service.

How Baseball Happened: Outrageous Lies Exposed! The True Story Revealed, by Thomas W. Gilbert, 384 pages, David R. Godine Publisher paperback, 2022

Abner Doubleday did not invent baseball. Nor did the game originate on rural ballfields. You’ll be amazed by Thomas Gilbert’s groundbreaking research in How Baseball Happened.

Gilbert, who is in his 60s, utilizes contemporaneous sources to buttress his account. He explains how the game and its rules evolved and introduces readers to its earliest stars.

Baseball was created as an amateur pastime in the 1840s by young men of the emerging urban middle class in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Up-and-coming men in white-collar professions viewed outdoor exercise as a means of maintaining a healthy physique in an environment that was prone to disease. They wished to distinguish themselves from local Anglophile elites by playing a homegrown sport in their leisure time.

Baseball expanded geographically along transportation routes — canals, railroads and ferries. Civil War veterans, who had learned the sport during their deployments, played the game upon returning home. For a short interval well before Jackie Robinson, baseball had been racially integrated.

In 2020, How Baseball Happened was honored with the Casey Award for the best baseball book of the year.