The Russians Are Coming

05/26/21 • 43 min

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!

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Man is a Free Agent

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).

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Adam v. Eve

Adam v. Eve The story of the Women’s Sport Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s is really two stories—it is the story of women pushing for access in the American sports world; and it is the story of many men opposing their participation and pushing back. In “Adam v. Eve,” Professor Matt explores what happened when the Modern Feminist Movement and the masculine American sports culture collided. Bibliography: Amy Burfoot, First Ladies of Running: 22 Inspiring Profiles of the Rebels, Rule Breakers, and Visionaries Who Changed the Sport Forever (New York: Rodale, 2016). Jamie Schultz, Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sport (Urban and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014). Susan Ware, Game, Set, Match: Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).