Watkins, Brandi. Sports Teams, Fans and Twitter: The Influence of Social Media on Relationships and Branding. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019. Pp. 115. Bibliography and Index. $85.00 hardcover, $80.50 e-book. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams The fan-team relationship, a cornerstone in the lives of many people and the bedrock of a sports teams’ survival.…
Gietschier, Steven, ed. Replays, Rivalries and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments In American Sports. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 205, Index. $95.00 hardcover, $17.96 e-book. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams How appropriate during the year that Major League Baseball brought its All-Star Game to Washington, D.C., that a resident of the nation’s…
Oates, Thomas P. Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 213. $95.00 hardcover, $23.36 e-book. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams In Football and Manliness: An Unauthorized Feminist Account of the NFL, Thomas P. Oates challenges the cultural politics of the National Football League. Oates uses…
By Brett L. Abrams Like many of you, I finished a book and quickly realized how much more work remained as one faced the challenges of marketing the work! Terry Bradshaw: From Super Bowl Champion to Television Personality emerged from Rowman & Littlefield which is a good press with a small publicity department. Since I…
Castro, Tony. DiMag & Mick: Sibling Rivals, Yankee Blood Brothers. Lanham, MD: Lyons Press, 2016. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams The author, a long-time sportswriter, spent many hours with Mickey Mantle on golf courses and at bars during the 1970s and 80s. Castro spent time with Joe DiMaggio’s friends and familiars. The result is this book…
Steinberg, Steve & Lyle Spatz. The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. Pp. 344. Notes and Index. $34.95 hardcover. Reviewed by Brett L. Abrams In his chapter in the seminal book New American Sport History, Stephen Hardy calls for the additional need for studies…
Over the past two months, the momentum of the opposition to Boston hosting the Olympic Games spurred me while the narratives coming out about Rio sparked Matt Holder to write pieces about the Olympics for this blog. Matt summarized his article on media narratives with the statement: “…we see that media narratives care less about…
The cycle of national group bids to host the Olympic Games usually has not generated the type of openly negative discussion that occurred this year in the United States. From newspaper articles to blogs, to “Olbermann” on ESPN, Boston’s winning bid to represent the U.S. as a potential Summer Olympic site generated a firestorm of…
After reading the Sports Documentary/Sports History issue of the Journal of Sports History (Summer 2014) I watched Michael Rapaport’s contribution to ESPN’s 30 for 30 series, “When the Garden Was Eden.” The documentary intended to show how important the New York Knicks teams of the early 1970s were to the NBA and that they represented an oasis in…
While writing my book, The Bullets, The Wizards and Washington, DC Basketball on professional basketball industry and Washington, DC, a central question emerged about the city’s fans. From the origins in the late 1920s through the Bullets in Landover, Maryland, the city’s teams never drew very well. Even when they reached the National Basketball Association…
Sport in American History 