Upon further review : the greatest what-ifs in sports history

Upon further review The greatest what-ifs in sports history

Mike Pesca

Book - 2018

"From Mike Pesca, host of the popular Slate podcast The Gist, comes the greatest sports minds imagining how the world would change if a play, trade, injury, or referee's call had just gone the other way. No announcer ever proclaimed: "Up Rises Frazier!" "Havlicek commits the foul, trying to steal the ball!" or "The Giants Lose the Pennant, The Giants Lose The Pennant!" Such moments are indelibly etched upon the mind of every sports fan. Or rather, they would be, had they happened. Sports are notoriously games of inches, and when we conjure the thought of certain athletes - like Bill Buckner or Scott Norwood - we can't help but apply a mental tape measure to the highlight reels of our minds. Playe...rs, coaches, and of course fans, obsess on the play when they ask, "What if?" Upon Further Review is the first book to answer that question. Upon Further Review is a book of counterfactual sporting scenarios. In its pages the reader will find expertly reported histories, where one small event is flipped on its head, and the resulting ripples are carefully documented, the likes of... What if the U.S. Boycotted Hitler's Olympics? What if Bobby Riggs beat Billie Jean King? What if Bucky Dent popped out at the foot of the Green Monster? What if Drew Bledsoe never got hurt? Upon Further Review takes classic arguments conducted over pints in a pub and places them in the hands of dozens of writers, athletes, and historians. From turning points that every sports fan rues or celebrates, to the forgotten would-be inflection points that defined sports, Upon Further Review answers age old questions, and settles the score, even if the score bounced off the crossbar"--

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Subjects
Sports > Anecdotes.
Sports > Miscellanea.
Anecdotes.
Trivia and miscellanea.
Genres
Anecdotes
Trivia and miscellanea
Published
New York : Twelve 2018.
Language
English
Main Author
Mike Pesca (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
x, 308 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781455540365
  • Foreword
  • Introduction
  • 1. What If Muhammad Ali Had Gotten His Draft Deferment?
  • 2. What If Football Had Been Deemed Too Boring in 1899?
  • 3. What If the United States Had Boycotted Hitler's Olympics?
  • 4. What If the 2017 Golden State Warriors Traveled Through Time to Play the Greatest Teams in NBA History?
  • 5. What If Horse Racing Was Still the Most Popular Sport in America?
  • 6. What If I Hadn't Written That Fan Letter to
  • 7. What If Wayne Gretzky Hadn't Been an Oiler?
  • 8. What If Major League Baseball Had Started Testing for Steroids in 1991?
  • 9. What If Bucky Dent Hadn't Homered over the Green Monster in 1978?
  • 10. What If Jerry Tarkanian Had Beaten the NCAA and Liberated College Basketball?
  • 11. What If Football Were Reinvented Today?
  • 12. What If There Had Always Been Sports PR Flacks?
  • 13. What If... Title IX Never Was?
  • 14. What If Tom Brady Hadn't Stepped In/Taken Over for an Injured Drew Bledsoe?
  • 15. What If the 1999 U.S. Women's National Soccer Team Had Lost the Women's World Cup?
  • 16. What If the Olympics Had Never Dropped Tug-of-War?
  • 17. What If Billie Jean King Had Lost to Bobby Riggs?
  • 18. What If Mike Tyson Had Beaten Buster Douglas?
  • 19. What If? A Tour Through NBA Injury Histor by Neil Paine with Introductory Notes on the Topic "What if Bernard King hadn't been injured?"
  • 20. What If the Dodgers Had Left Brooklyn?
  • 21. What If a Blimp Full of Money Had Exploded over World Track Headquarters in 1952?
  • 22. What If Baseball Teams Only Played Once a Week?
  • 23. What If Bobby Fischer Had Received Proper Psychiatric Help?
  • 24. What If Basketball Rims Were Smaller Than Basketballs?
  • 25. What If the AFL-NFL Merger Had Been Complicated by the Jets' Loss in Super Bowl III?
  • 26. What If the National League Had the DH?
  • 27. What If Nixon Had Been Good at Football?
  • 28. What If Bill Walton Had Healthy Knees?
  • 29. What If Roger Bannister Trained Today?
  • 30. What If Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton's Pass Hadn't Gone Awry?
  • 31. What If Game 7 of the 2016 World Series Had Turned Into Every Sports Movie Ever Made?
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Index
  • About the Contributors
Review by Booklist Review

What if Broadway Joe had failed to deliver on his audacious prediction of a Jets victory in Super Bowl III? What if the Dodgers had remained in Brooklyn? What if Bill Walton's knees had not given out early in his NBA career? Though difficulty in accessing portals to alternate universes may prevent readers from checking the veracity of these 30 speculative essays, the imaginative authors Pesca has enlisted (mostly from among sports journalists) help readers understand current realities in the world of sports by showing how quite different realities could easily have developed under different but quite conceivable circumstances. Even when the essays focus largely on a single sports star (such as Tom Brady or Wayne Gretzky), their what-if conjectures open onto fundamental questions about the character of entire teams, leagues, sports, and fan bases. The essay contemplating the hypothetical effects of an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin even compels readers to consider the potent influence of sports on geopolitics. A thought-provoking venture into sports' road-not-taken possibilities.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In his first book, Pesca, host of The Gist podcast, collects lively and informative essays on possible alternatives to some of the most notable moments in sports history. The entries come from sports columnists, historians, documentarians, and fans, and "propose hypotheticals that sparked the imagination, that opened the door to a hidden history or set off a plausible chain reaction we might not have even considered." Highlights include Shira Springer's "What If the United States Had Boycotted Hitler's Olympics?" in which she presents a convincing case that a boycott would have been better for the 1936 Olympics, immediately setting the sporting event on "a more progressive" course. In "What If Muhammad Ali Had Gotten His Draft Deferment?" Leigh Montville convincingly argues that Ali's time away from boxing in 1966 "was the most important time of all"-that without his image of "challenging authority," Ali's career would have been "perfunctory, simply about boxing." In one of the best essays, "What If Nat 'Sweetwater' Clifton's Pass Hadn't Gone Awry?" Claude Johnson takes a look at racism in the early days of professional basketball with Nat Clifton playing in 1948 on the New York Rens, an all-black pro basketball team (Clifton's errant pass caused the Rens to lose the game, and perhaps a franchise spot on the newly formed NBA). Enlightening and entertaining, Pesca's collection of hypothetical sports outcomes gives sports fans much food for thought. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

More than 30 what-if stories that reinvent sports history, and perhaps the greater national history.Former NPR sports reporter Pesca, host of the Slate podcast The Gist, asked his contributors to give the full trajectory of the what-if, not just how one game may have played out had Bill Buckner not booted a routine ground ball or Drew Bledsoe not gotten hurt and given way to Tom Brady. The author wants the bigger picture: how it might have changed the sport, a life, the politics of a nation, or paved over major cultural roadblocks, like racism. That is a tall order for rather short fantasiesroughly five to 10 pagesbut a surprising number pull it off. "What If Nixon Had Been Good at Football?" by Julian Zelizer, is a wonderful little psycho-sporting profile that presents Nixon as a confident, honest, comfortable-in-his-own-skin man. "What If Roger Bannister Trained Today?" asks Liam Boylan-Pett. Instead of squeezing in a few hours per week between medical school classes, what if he had followed today's rigorous training regimens? Probably a new world record. What if Muhammad Ali had gotten his draft deferment? What if professional football were invented today? With what we know about head trauma, we might have very different play and players. For those readers who are intimate with a particular evente.g., what if Billie-Jean King had lost to the huckster Bobby Riggs? What if Brady hadn't stepped in for the injured Bledsoe?these counterfactual stories may feel thin on the bone. There are, for instance, lots of reasons besides Brady that the New England Patriots are the dynasty they have become, and it does feel like coaches, other players, and the general state of the sport at the time get short shrift. Other notable contributors include Leigh Montville, Jeremy Schaap, Will Leitch, and Mary Pilon.Some quibbles aside, this is sports escapism brought to new and entertaining heights. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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