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After more than 40 years of covering the "beautiful game," Newsday sportswriter and FrontRowSoccer.com editor Michael Lewis ( Soccer for Dummies ) knows more than a thing or two about the evolution of soccer in this country.  A self-professed "Zelig of soccer," the NYC-based Lewis has covered some of the sport's most important events, including eight World Cups, seven Olympic tournaments, and all...

We cap off the long Memorial Day holiday weekend with a look back at one of the New York metropolitan area's most memorable sports stadiums of yore – the Polo Grounds – with author and Minnesota Twins official scorer Stew Thornley ( The Polo Grounds: Essays and Memories of New York City's Historic Ballpark, 1880-1963 ). The "Polo Grounds" was actually the name of multiple structures across upper M...

Just weeks after its sudden collapse, we take our first look at the brief life of the Alliance of American Football with Sports Illustrated football writer and MMQB NFL podcast host Conor Orr ( The Curious Rise and Spectacular Crash of the Alliance of American Football ; More Strange Tales from the Collapse of the AAF ). Inspired by his work producing the 2017 documentary This Was the XFL for ESPN...

Long-time South Florida Sun-Sentinel soccer columnist Jeff Rusnak joins to discuss the rich past, transitional present and promising future of one of American pro soccer's most venerable, yet historically underrated venues – Ft. Lauderdale, Florida's Lockhart Stadium. Originally built in 1959 as an American football and track venue for four high schools in the region and named after a former city...

WKKY-FM radio personality and sports author Gary Webster ( The League That Didn't Exist ) helps us return to the curious story of the All-America Football Conference – the well-funded upstart that competed directly with the NFL in the late 1940s for supremacy of the still-fledgling sport of US pro football. After being rebuffed by the NFL to expand, influential Chicago Tribune sports editor (and b...

Author Ken Krsolovic ( League Park: Historic Home of Cleveland Baseball, 1891-1946 ) joins the podcast to go deep into the history and legacy of Cleveland's first major league sports stadium. Originally built for the National League's Cleveland Spiders, team owner Frank Robison strategically built the wood-constructed League Park at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Dunham (now East 66th) Street...

Professional union labor lawyer and Society for American Soccer History sports historian Steve Holroyd returns to the podcast to go deep into one of the more curious rabbit holes in North American Soccer League history. In early 1977, Ed Garvey, a labor lawyer and head of the newly-formed National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), recruited Washington Diplomats midfielder John Kerr to h...

We're stuck in the minors again this week – this time with Microsoft News senior managing editor and former newspaper sportswriter David Herman ( Almost Yankees: The Summer of '81 and the Greatest Baseball Team You've Never Heard Of ) – as we discuss the memorable story and unique circumstances of the 1981 championship season of the International League's Columbus Clippers, the then-flagship farm...

Longtime USA Today sports writer/producer César Brioso ( Last Seasons in Havana: The Castro Revolution and the End of Professional Baseball in Cuba ) joins the show to explore the rich parallel histories of America's and Cuba's shared national pastime – and the colorful period of the late 1950s/early 1960s when it appeared baseball in the island nation was mainstreaming its way into eventual US ma...

Documentary filmmakers Jason Reid and Adam Brown ( Sonicsgate: Requiem for a Team ) join host Tim Hanlon to discuss the long, tortuous and acrimoniously messy departure of the NBA's iconic Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City in the summer of 2008 – a story newly relevant as the "Emerald City" prepares to welcome a new NHL expansion franchise, and as former owner (and Starbucks CEO Emeritus) Howar...

In a league uniquely rich in comic misadventures and financial disasters, perhaps no one franchise from the World Football League's inaugural 1974 season stood out more for its own brand of woeful ineptitude than the Detroit Wheels. Saddled from inception by an unwieldy ownership group of 33 different founding investors – including Motown Records superstar Marvin Gaye and Little Caesar's Pizza fou...

On a cold and ominous Sunday, December 7, 1941, Major League Baseball's owners were gathered in Chicago for their annual winter meetings, just two months after one of the sport's greatest seasons. For the owners, the dramatic news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor earlier that morning was not only an assault on the United States, but also a direct threat to the future of the national pastime...

We celebrate our second anniversary with the intriguing background story of the original Major Indoor Soccer League, with the man who started it all – Ed Tepper.  A commercial real estate developer by trade, Tepper actually got his start in pro sports ownership as the owner of the original National Lacrosse League's Philadelphia Wings – only to switch allegiances to an inchoate indoor offshoot of...

World Football League researcher extraordinaire Mark Speck ( And a Dollar Short: The Empty Promises, Broken Dreams, and Somewhat-Less-Than-Comic Misadventures of the 1974 Florida Blazers ) returns to the podcast to discuss the incredible story of Orlando's first professional sports franchise – and the crazy challenger football league that hastened both its creation and demise. The Florida Blazers...

Legendary New York Yankees baseball play-by-play man John Sterling joins host Tim Hanlon for a cavalcade of career memories from his 50+ year journey in sports broadcasting – including a treasure trove of stops along the way with previously incarnated or otherwise defunct teams (and leagues). Now celebrating his 30th consecutive season with the Bronx Bombers, Sterling's unique vocal stylings have...

We celebrate our 100th(!) episode with one of the founding owners of the pioneering World Hockey Association – and the man ultimately responsible for the absorption of four its teams into the NHL in the "don't-call-it-a-merger" of 1979.  Hollywood film producer and original New England Whalers founder/owner Howard Baldwin ( Slim and None: My Wild Ride from the WHA to the NHL and All the Way to Hol...

You know him today as the long-time television play-by-play voice of Major League Baseball's Washington Nationals.  But before becoming one of the baseball's most admired and durable broadcasters, Bob Carpenter cut his professional teeth in the burgeoning (but ultimately fleeting) American pro soccer scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s as the lead "man-behind-the-mic" for such iconic teams as...

As another NFL season closes, we shift gears toward the forthcoming Alliance of American Football – the first of two new leagues attempting to again extend the pro game into viable Spring season play – where the USFL, World League of American Football and NFL Europe have famously tried before.  The other – both in 2001 and in a reincarnated form coming next year – was and is the XFL, which we fina...

Win or lose in next week's Super Bowl LIII, the five-time NFL champion New England Patriots are already guaranteed a spot in the annals of pro football history as one of the sport's most dominant teams – especially when viewed through the truncated lens of the last two decades. That said, a legion of successful clubs over the league's prior eight decades – such as the Green Bay Packers of 1929-44...

We throw another chunk of firewood into our baseball hot stove this week, as we warm up with the surprisingly long and rich history of the National Pastime in the Nation's Capital with sports PR veteran Fred Frommer ( You Gotta Have Heart: A History of Washington Baseball from 1859 to the 2012 National League East Champions ). While historically smaller in population than its more industrial neigh...

It was December 1979, and Denver-area IT marketing and sales executive Ron Maierhofer was having what some would consider to be a mid-life crisis.  Just off the heels of an annual work retreat and now vacationing on a British Virgin Islands beach with his wife, Maierhofer – a second-generation German-American immigrant and a former player with a lifelong passion for and recreational involvement in...

We kick off the New Year with our first-ever discussion about one of Major League Baseball's most enduring enigmas – the ephemeral, one-season Seattle Pilots. However, as we discover in our conversation with this week's guest Bill Mullins ( Becoming Big League: Seattle, The Pilots, and Stadium Politics ), the story of the team's 1969 American League misadventures has a much longer historical arc –...

We close out an amazing second season of episodes with a special year-end conversation featuring the US pro soccer pioneer who is, at least indirectly, responsible for the creation of this little podcast.   Just weeks after signing with the fledgling New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League in January 1976, league All Star Bobby Smith (along with fellow Philadelphia Atoms teammate Bob R...

We celebrate the (labor dispute-delayed) opening weekend of the National Lacrosse League's 2018-19 season – as well as the return of the iconic Philadelphia Wings franchise – with two of pro box lacrosse's most ardent fans and chief chroniclers.   Metro Philly natives Steve Holroyd and Dave Coleman are the engines behind the historical treasure trove known as RetroLax.com , which digs deep into th...

The images are grainy, the commentary earnestly naïve, and the theme music disco-infused, but the bigger picture is clear – it's American soccer history, in all its VHS videotape glory. Gleaned from a simpler, pre-HD media landscape of the 1970s and early 1980s – much of it before even the mass consumer adoption of the VCR – the roughly 900 hours of TV broadcast match coverage that still survives...