Good Seats Still Available

Pop culture writer/filmmaker Steven Blush (" American Hardcore ") joins the festivities this week to (at long last) help us delve into the enigmatic story of the original 1970s-era incarnation of World Team Tennis - including an exclusive preview of his upcoming book & documentary Bustin' Balls: World Team Tennis - Pro Sports, Pop Culture and Progressive Politics .   From the "Bustin' Balls" book...

When legendary Red Sox slugger Ted Williams gave his induction speech at the National Baseball Hall of Fame on July 25, 1966, he unexpectedly included a blunt admonition to the sport's establishment that something in the hallowed Hall was significantly awry - the absence of standout players from the Negro Leagues: "I've been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, and I hope some day the...

Logo archivist Chris Creamer ( SportsLogos.net ) and graphic brand designer Todd Radom ( Todd Radom Design ) join this week's show to dive into the rich and fascinating visual story of the National Hockey League's nearly 103-year history - as told by the names, logos and uniforms of its teams. Their new book collaboration Fabric of the Game: The Stories Behind the NHL's Names, Logos and Uniforms i...

Veteran sportswriter and Birmingham, AL native Scott Adamson ( The Home Team: My Bromance with Off-Brand Football ) joins the pod to discuss his curious decades-long relationship with the various attempts at rooting pro football in the "Magic City." Birmingham's venerable Legion Field - known legendarily as the "Football Capital of the South" for its long-time association with the annual Alabama-A...

From the book jacket of the 2007 reissue of Invisible Men: Life in Baseball's Negro Leagues - the seminal 1983 book by this week's guest Donn Rogosin: "In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier and became a hero for [B]lack and white Americans, yet Robinson was a Negro League player before he integrated Major League baseball. Negro League ballplayers had been thrilling [B]lack fans s...

Writer/author (and Episode 158 guest) Eric Nusbaum ( " Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between " ) returns for a second visit, this time to help us obsess about the curious story of the National League's 1899 Cleveland Spiders - the worst major league baseball team of all time. While today's current generation of baseball fans will swear that the 1962 NL expansion...

Little did we know when we dropped our minor league hockey tribute to the 1990s ECHL Columbus Chill in our Episode 169 with David Paitson & Craig Merz earlier this year that it would not only become our most listened-to episode of 2020 (so far), but would also unearth a project devoted to the colorful history of the forgotten teams that preceded it. Columbus native and Cincinnati creative agency p...

Columbia College Chicago cultural studies professor Rich King ( Redskins: Insult and Brand ) joins the podcast this week to discuss the roots and long-simmering backstory of the Washington NFL football franchise's problematic - and now former - nickname. Investigative reporter Tisha Thompson framed the situation in her recent piece for ESPN : "Daniel Snyder endured decades of protests, lawsuits an...

If we ever get around to creating a Good Seats Still Available "Hall of Fame," this week's return guest will most certainly be part of its inaugural class of inductees. Dennis Murphy (" Murph: The Sports Entrepreneur Man and His Leagues ") is a bona fide legend in sports entrepreneurial circles - a man responsible for helping found no less than four "major" game-changing leagues across the North A...

We steal away for a little summer vacation time this week - but not before sitting down for a massively enjoyable interview with fellow defunct sports enthusiast and long-time friend-of-the-show P.F. Wilson - as a guest on his comedy-tinged podcast " PF's Tape Recorder ." P.F. (née Patrick François) is also the creative engine behind one of our longest-running sponsors OldSchoolShirts.com - where...

We cross the virtual border northward this week to obsess about the original incarnation of hockey's Winnipeg Jets - with author/team completist Curtis Walker (" Winnipeg Jets: The WHA Years Day By Day "; " Coming Up Short: The Comprehensive History of the NHL's Winnipeg Jets "). One of the twelve founding franchises in the upstart World Hockey Association's inaugural 1972-73 season, the Jets were...

By popular demand, former Los Angeles Lazers president and Episode 166 guest Ronnie Weinstein returns for an eagerly-awaited "part two" conversation about his sojourn through professional indoor soccer - this time centered on the intriguing story of the 1990s-era Continental Indoor Soccer League he helped create and operate. Loosely borne from the 1992 collapse of the Major ( née Indoor) Soccer Le...

Cycling writer/historian Peter Nye ( Hearts of Lions: The History of American Bicycle Racing ) joins the podcast this week to help us understand the long and curious backstory behind the 1989 launch of the Tour de Trump - a major world-class cycling event that, for a brief period, aspired to become the American equivalent of the sport's iconic Tour de France. Once the king of sports in the US at t...

As the National Women's Soccer League concludes its deftly assembled 2020 Challenge Cup tournament (with congrats to the Houston Dash on their first-ever major trophy), we enlist sportswriter/soccer insider Beau Dure (" 2012: The Year That Saved Women's Soccer ") to help us make sense of the confoundingly discontinuous history of the women's pro game in the US over the last 20 years - and the unwi...

Longtime sports/information technology entrepreneur/executive Dave Lockton joins this week to discuss his managerial adventures in the geographically fragmented and provincially fractious auto racing scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s – including the founding of the groundbreaking Ontario Motor Speedway, and its role in the ideation of the ultimate "all-star" professional driving competition – th...

We point our GPS coordinates this week to the endearingly enigmatic city of New Orleans, for an overdue look into the Big Easy's chaotic pro sports franchise history – with Historic New Orleans Collection writer (and recovering sports scribe) Nick Weldon (" A Streetcar Named Basketball "). Although a mainstay of baseball's minor and Negro leagues since the dawn of the sport's professional era in t...

Pittsburgh-based The Athletic sportswriter Stephen J. Nesbitt ( "How the Pipers, Condors and Pro Basketball in Pittsburgh Went Extinct" ) joins to help us dig into the surprisingly rich (though mostly woeful) history of professional hoops in the Steel City. Though the game has long thrived at the collegiate level (Pitt's Panthers began playing in 1905; the Duquesne Dukes in 1914), the city's recor...

When the original version of the modern-era Washington Senators announced its intention to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul in 1960 to become the Twins the following season, Major League Baseball moved up part of its planned 1962 expansion by a year to help stave off dual competitive threats of both a new challenger Continental League and the potential loss of its longstanding federal antitrust ex...

We take a rare dip into the minors this week with the intriguing story of hockey's Columbus Chill – the 1990s sensation that took the East Coast Hockey League and the Ohio capital's sports scene by storm, and helped set the table for Columbus's ascension into top-tier "major league" status by the dawn of the 2000s. Historically overshadowed by the scale, prowess and outsized culture of its hometow...

Negro League ace historian/author Jim Overmyer ( Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles ; Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City ) returns for a deep dive into the extraordinary dual-sport career of Negro League baseball AND Black Fives-era basketball legend Cumberland Posey – including the two dominating teams he founded, owned, managed, and pla...

While we ruminate on what a potential resumption of the National Hockey League's delayed 2020 regular season (and playoffs) might look like in the months ahead, we pause to look back at the rich, but altogether confounding history of the world's premier pro hockey circuit with Down Goes Brown blog scribe and Athletic columnist Sean McIndoe ( The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL: The World's Most...

The Major Indoor Soccer League's rocket red ball bounces back our way this week for an Eighties-style rewind into the story of the Los Angeles Lazers – as seen through the eyes of one of its chief front office architects, Ronnie Weinstein. Claimed from dormancy (as the previous Philadelphia Fever) by LA sports baron Dr. Jerry Buss – owner of the 1980 NBA champion Lakers, NHL Kings, 1981 TeamTennis...

It's our deepest dive yet into the legendarily one-of-a-kind All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with Marshall University Professor of Women's Sport History Kat Williams ( The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives ). Widely acknowledged as the forerunner of women's professional league sports in the United States, the pioneering AAGPBL featured mor...

The curious story of baseball's Atlantic City (NJ) Bacharach Giants originates from a unique intersection of racism, tourism, and politics. In 1915, an independent semi-pro "Atlantic City Colored League" was formed to provide an entertainment outlet for the city's 11,000+ black residents – with the hope being they would attend the games and stay off the boardwalk, a then-booming summer haven for w...

ESPN.com NFL Nation reporter Kevin Seifert stops by to help us perform a preliminary autopsy on the surprisingly sudden death of the XFL – WWE founder Vince McMahon's second attempt at creating a viable alternative professional football league to that of the mighty NFL. A confident, but visibly mellower McMahon announced the league's unlikely rebirth at a video press conference on January 28, 2018...