Man is a Free Agent

05/19/21 • 44 min

Man is a Free Agent For over a century, professional athletes in the United States were the exclusive property of the team that signed them first. In baseball, team owners called it the “reserve system” and they said it was essential for the good of the game. The players called it something else—they said it was “slavery.” In this episode of American Sport, we explore the battle between owners and players that culminated with the birth of free agency in the 1970s (someone, who shall remain anonymous, also urges LeBron James to leave the NBA and create his own pro basketball league). Bibliography: John Helyar, Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994). Marvin Miller, A Whole Different Ball Game: The Inside Story of the Baseball Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1991). Jon Pessah, The Game, Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball’s Power Brokers (New York, Boston, and London: Back Bay Books, 2015). Brad Snyder, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports (New York: Penguin, 2006).

Previous Episode

The Fight of the Century

The Fight of the Century On July 4, 1910, in a makeshift wooden boxing arena in Reno, Nevada, a white man named Jim Jeffries climbed into the ring to fight a black man named Jack Johnson, and the nation held its breath. Taking place in an era of Darwinian thought and murderous racial anxieties, the outcome of the “Fight of the Century” caused the death of dozens of Americans and sparked the first nationwide race riot in American history. Bibliography: Jack Johnson, My Life: In the Ring and Out (Chicago: National Sports Publishing Co., 1927). Randy Roberts, Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes (New York: Free Press, 1983). Jeffrey Sammons, Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990). Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Random House, 2004).

Next Episode

The Russians Are Coming

The Russians Are Coming The Cold War was a military contest, a fight to secure economic markets, a race for scientific breakthroughs—and it was an athletic competition. Every four years, the Olympic Games provided an arena where American and Soviet athletes could meet and wage a battle for international supremacy. “The Russians are Coming” is the story of hotly contested medal counts, secret political defections, how heroes are made, and why you did the standing broad jump in elementary school. Bibliography: Susan Cahn, Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Women’s Sports (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). David Goldblatt, The Games: A Global History of the Olympic Games (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2016).* Allen Guttmann, The Games Must Go On: Avery Brundage and the Olympic Movement (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Toby Rider, Cold War Games: Propaganda, the Olympics, and U.S. Foreign Policy (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017). * Special mention to David Goldblatt and his line about getting “tased from a drone”...so good I had to steal it!