Good Seats Still Available

We welcome budding sports historian - and previous Episode 190 guest - Alan Bass ("Ed Snider: The Last Sports Mogul") back to our microphones this week, this time to delve into the life and times of modern-day Philadelphia's patron saint of professional sports. The dustjacket for The Last Sports Mogul makes the case: "Most sports team owners make their money elsewhere and purchase a team as an extravagant hobby - but that is not the story of Ed Snider. One of the few owners in history to get control of a franchise by mortgaging nearly everything to his name, the longtime Philadelphia Flyers chairman would go on to form the billion-dollar empire of Comcast-Spectacor and cement his standing as one of the most influential businessmen in the city’s history.  "Snider was ambitious and entrepreneurial, though extraordinarily demanding of those who worked for him. He was affectionate with his loved ones, yet often showed a surprising lack of emotional intelligence. His staunch capitalist beliefs contrasted his pr

Fans of the original NHL version (1979-96) of the Winnipeg Jets, as well as the first ten seasons (1997-2007) of their subsequent incarnation as the Phoenix Coyotes, will surely remember the dulcet tones of team radio and TV play-by-play broadcaster Curt Keilback (Two Minutes for Talking to Myself: Jets, Coyotes, Tales, Opinions). For 27 seasons - spanning some 2400+ games - ​Keilback was the signature voice of the since-rebranded Arizona franchise, a seemingly lone constant amidst the club's steady stream of existential change from 1970s World Hockey Association dominance, to NHL small-market competitive frustration, to (supposedly) "greener pastures" in the Valley of the Sun. Keilback takes us on clear-eyed journey back through some of the more memorable moments of his Jets/Coyotes broadcasting career, including: the original (and much-copied) "Winnipeg White Out;" the ill-fated 1996 "Save the Jets" campaign; how he kept his job despite the Jets' impending move; the not-so-great coaching tenure of "The Grea

​Author/team biographer Steve Guinan (We Are the Troopers: The Women of the Winningest Team in Pro Football History) helps us celebrate the return of football this week - with a look back at ​​the unheralded story of the most dominant women's team of the 1970s -the Toledo Troopers. Winners of seven consecutive championships across two different leagues - Sid Friedman's barnstorming Women’s Professional Football League (1971-72), and the pioneering true-pro successor National Women's Football League (1974-77) - the Troopers compiled an astounding 58-4-1 record over its nine years of life, including six seasons of undefeated play. Led by the league's most recognizable star Linda Jefferson and overseen by its hard-charging owner/head coach Bill Stout - the Troopers' roster was an unlikely assemblage of housewives, factory workers, hairdressers, former nuns, high school teachers, bartenders, mail carriers, pilots, and would-be drill sergeants - whose combined spirit, tenacity and simple "love for the game" helped

As a young girl growing up in tiny, rural Throckmorton, Texas in the mid-1950s, memoirist Addie Beth Denton ("108 Stitches: A Girl Grows Up With Baseball") had only a vague understanding of what her father and uncle did for a living - except that they seemed to always be talking about baseball. Only as she grew older did she come to realize all that discussion - not to mention her bevy of annual summertime excursions to professional parks all over the country - was much more than just a passing family curiosity. In fact, she discovered that her uncle Harry Craft had not only been a respectable big-league outfielder with the Cincinnati Reds for nearly six seasons (1937-42) before joining the Navy in the war effort - but was now in the midst of a fledgling managerial career that saw him skippering numerous New York Yankees farm clubs, as well as two of the majors' newest: the 1955 Kansas City As (relocated from Philadelphia) and the 1962 expansion Houston Colt .45s. Along the way, Denton recalls innumerable

The Athletic Major League Soccer staff writer Pablo Maurer steps into our vortex of what-used-to-be in professional sports this week, with a look back at some of the more confounding and overlooked stories of the not-so-distant past of US pro soccer. It's our deepest dives yet into memorable North American Soccer League gems like 1977's one-year wonder Team Hawaii; 1983's divisive US Men's National Team-as-pro-franchise Team America; the curious Stateside detours of world greats like Bayern Munich superstar Gerd Müeller, Dutch legend Johan Cruyff and Manchester United icon George Best - plus, of course, the NASL's inventive ahead-of-its-time 35-yard-line Shootout tie-breaker. We also tackle some of the already forgotten early days of Major League Soccer - including its own version of the Shootout; LA's ill-fated "first" second franchise Chivas USA; and impossible-to-forget franchise monikers like Wiz, Burn, Clash, and MetroStars. PLUS: the unheralded pre-MLS rules experiments of the mid-90s USISL minor league

Obscure trivia answers abound this week, as we return to the pro rinks of the 1970s with Twin Cities sports fan extraordinaire Dan Whenesota ("A Slap Shot in Time") for a look back at the not one, but two World Hockey Association franchises known as the Minnesota Fighting Saints. The first team was one of the WHA's original twelve franchises, playing from 1972 until mid-1976; the second was the rebirth of the league's hastily relocated Cleveland Crusaders, and played for part of 1976-77 season.  Neither incarnation completed its final season of play. Save for a few games in the early months of the first version's inaugural season, both Fighting Saints played in the uniquely configured St. Paul Civic Center - where clear acrylic glass dasher boards offered fans completely unobscured views of all the action. As for action, there was plenty - both in terms of fan-friendly uptempo offensive play, and aggressive, often penalty-drawing physicality - befitting of the team's name and iconic logo. If you remember th

We spotlight the new Amazon Prime Video series "A League of Their Own" - an inventively reimagined telling of the story of the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (and originally made famous in the 1992 Penny Marshall-directed motion picture of the same name) - with writer and executive producer Desta Tedros Reff. Decidedly more "dramedy" in tone than the comedic approach of the namesake film (or even its short-lived, lesser-remembered CBS-TV primetime sitcom spinoff the following year), the new League still builds its rich storyline around the AAGPBL's four-time champion Rockford (IL) Peaches - while notably incorporating race and gender identity themes not previously addressed (or even acknowledged) in the original. Tedros Reff takes us inside the myriad of challenges behind the making of the series, including: the persistent curveballs thrown by COVID-era production scheduling; the purposeful approach to historical accuracy (yes, various scenes were shot in Rockford); and the o

Life has come full circle for TV news reporter-turned-Triple-A baseball play-by-play broadcaster Mike Capps ("Grinders: Baseball's Intrepid Infantry") - now the longtime radio voice of the Pacific Coast League's Round Rock Express. As a kid in early-1960s North Texas, Capps grew up immersed in the exploits of Dallas-Fort Worth's minor league Rangers, Cats and Spurs - intrigued by rotating rosters of determined pay-your-dues hopefuls bouncing up and down between baseball's majors and minors - players his grandfather called the "engine" of the sport. After an intense award-winning professional career covering hard news for local Metroplex TV stations and early 1990s Gulf War-era CNN, Capps found solace and renewed purpose in those early childhood memories of the "grinders" of the game he fell in love with - reinventing himself in their mold into a second post-journalism work life as an (also) award-winning baseball play-by-play man for minor-league clubs in outposts like Tyler, TX (the former Texas-Louisiana

It wasn’t easy being a soccer fan in the United States in the 1980s.  While the 24-team North American American Soccer League ushered in the decade with an air of stability and momentum (the league even sold a pennant proclaiming the game the “Sport of the 80’s”), it wasn’t long before big-time American pro soccer was dangerously on the ropes (the NASL shrank to just nine franchises by 1984) – and then seemingly gone for good when the league officially sank into oblivion in early 1985. For a nascent generation of US fans newly hooked on the world’s “beautiful game,” it felt like an abandonment – and an air of disillusionment beset the American soccer scene in the immediate years that followed.  Slowly and awkwardly, Americans slowly got wise – miraculously qualifying for the 1990 World Cup in Italy, hosting the event four years later, and re-birthing the pro game with Major League Soccer in 1996 – and ultimately evolved it into one of the most popular sports in the country. Sportswriter/author Hal Phillips (

Pro hockey history enthusiast/author Steve Currier (Episode 37; "The California Golden Seals: A Tale of White Skates, Red Ink, and One of the NHL's Most Outlandish Teams") returns to the show after a five-year absence - this time to accompany us deep down the rabbit hole of one of the National Hockey League's most overlooked adventures of the 1970s.   In his new book "When the NHL Invaded Japan: The Washington Capitals, the Kansas City Scouts and the Coca-Cola Bottlers' Cup", Currier recounts the story behind the NHL's long-forgotten, but historically relevant 1976 promotional exhibition series (colloquially known as the "NHL Japan Series") between the league's two most lamentable teams that year - the sophomore-twin Washington Capitals (11W-59L-10T) and Kansas City Scouts (12-56-12) - and their curious mission to introduce professional hockey to the Land of the Rising Sun.

Chicago sports fans of a certain age may remember the name Charlie Evranian atop the masthead of the executive suite (behind inimitable owner Lee Stern, of course) of the 1981 outdoor version of the North American Soccer League's Chicago Sting - when that club delivered the first major pro championship to the Windy City since 1963's NFL Bears.   (Not to mention the team's first two barn-burning indoor NASL seasons at the former "Madhouse on Madison".)   But Evranian's time leading the Sting of the early 1980s was merely a brief mile-marker along a fascinatingly peripatetic 20+ year journey across a litany of (mostly forgotten) teams and leagues in both the majors and minors of professional sports management - laden with unbelievable twists and turns that only a podcast of a certain genre could love.   Evranian takes us on a wild ride alongside the likes of legendary front office figures like Bill Veeck, Ted Turner, Pat Williams, and Earl Foreman - for memorable stops including: leading baseball's Class A Gr

Fresno Grizzlies baseball TV play-by-play broadcaster (and Episode 208 guest) Dan Taylor ("Lights, Camera, Fastball: How the Hollywood Stars Changed Baseball") returns to the podcast - this time with the story of one of the most unheralded players in pro football history.   In his new book "Walking Alone: The Untold Journey of Football Pioneer Kenny Washington," Taylor writes the first solo biography devoted to collegiate star and original Los Angeles Rams standout running back Kenny Washington (1918-71) - perhaps the best known of the pro game's "Forgotten Four" (the others: Woody Strode, Bill Willis, and Marion Motley) - collectively recognized as the first Black athletes to permanently break pro football's color barrier in 1946.    Of the group, it was Washington - a one-time UCLA teammate of Jackie Robinson in both baseball and football - who officially re-integrated the NFL by signing with the just-relocated-from-Cleveland Rams (he convinced the club to later sign Strode).    While Willis and Motley wer

We're back from vacation with a 50th anniversary rewind of 1972's iconic "Summit Series" between "Team Canada" (featuring the NHL's best from north of the border) and the then-Soviet Union - with veteran sports journalist/hockey analyst Scott Morrison ("1972: The Series That Changed Hockey Forever").   It's a deep dive into the curious, yet now-iconic battle between the hockey's two top superpowers at the time - played against the backdrop of global 1970s-era Cold War tensions - that morphed from a relatively unassuming cultural exchange-oriented pre-season "exhibition" into the defining hallmark of each country's rich hockey heritage.   All culminating with Toronto Maple Leaf forward Paul Henderson's dramatic and decisive late-third-period "goal heard around the world" ​(​on September 28, 1972) to clinch the eighth and final game of an epic month-long hockey series that, to this day, remains Canada's most enduring professional sports triumph.

[We celebrate eminent North-of-the-border sportswriter Ed Willes' selection to the Canadian Football Hall of Fame's media wing last week - with a June 2018 archive re-release of one our most popular episodes!] As Johnny Manziel’s pro football comeback journey wraps up a promising pre-season with the Canadian Football League’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats, we take a moment this week to reminisce on the approaching 25th anniversary of the CFL’s bold, but ultimately ill-fated attempt to bring its exciting brand of pigskin south of the border in 1993. When the NFL put the brakes on its two-year World League of American Football experiment in the summer of 1992 (which included a franchise in Montreal, dubbed the “Machine”), an economically wobbly CFL sensed an opportunity to fill the gap in US markets newly comfortable with the notion of pro football, as well as a potential growth path for the tradition-rich Canadian game to expand outside the Provinces.  In fact, two WLAF owners, Fred Anderson (Sacramento Surge) and Larr

[A June 2017 archive re-release favorite with one of the true insiders behind the initial success of the legendary original 1970s/80s Major Indoor Soccer League!] This week, Tim Hanlon buckles up for a wild ride through the tumultuous early years of the original Major Indoor Soccer League with sports PR veteran Michael Menchel, in our longest and most anecdote-filled episode yet!  Menchel takes us on a head-spinning audio journey across some of the most memorable (and forgettable) franchises in professional indoor soccer history – including stops in Long Island, NY (the Arrows trade for Pete Rose!); New Jersey (scoring champ Fred Grgurev’s unique approach to car maintenance!); Houston (the “Summit Soccer” borrows its name from the arena it plays in and its players from the NASL’s Hurricane!); Baltimore (the marketing genius of Tim Leiweke!); and Hartford (what the hell is a “Hellion”?).   Plus, Menchel:  hits the road with Frank Deford;  spends a year outdoors among the Caribou(s?) of Colorado;  has a bad day

It's a special "retcon" episode this week, as we dig into both the original and revisionist histories of the NBA's Charlotte Hornets - with the first incarnation's most recognizable player, and the second iteration's most logical keeper-of-the-flame: Tyrone "Muggsy" Bogues.   Over a 14-year pro NBA career, Bogues ("Muggsy: My Life From a kid in the Projects to the Godfather of Small Ball") was best known for his ten standout seasons of on-court wizardry with the 1988 expansion version of the Hornets - which lit up the league in attendance (highest in the NBA for seven seasons, including an unprecedented string of 364 consecutive sellouts in the 22,500-seat Charlotte Coliseum [aka "The Hive"]); dynamic up-tempo style (featuring a bevy of budding stars like Alonzo Mourning, Larry Johnson, Glen Rice, and Dell Curry, as well as future Naismith Basketball Hall of Famers Robert Parish and Vlade Divac); and unique, ahead-of-their-time Alexander Julian-designed purple and teal uniforms.   Bogues regales us with so

Society for American Baseball Research historian/chronicler Justin Mckinney (Baseball's Union Association: The Short, Strange Life of a 19th-Century Major League) joins the podcast this week to weigh in on the debate that continues to swirl around baseball's curious one-season Union Association - namely, was it a truly major league?   As first broached in our Episode 73 with Jon Springer, the National League was less than a decade old back in 1884, and the rival American Association, which had been established two years earlier, was nipping at its heels.  "Organized Baseball" had just been formed to help codify the still-gestating professional version of the game.   But when a maverick millionaire and spurned team-owner aspirant named Henry Lucas established a new third major league that year - the Union Association - the pro game erupted into chaos.   Come for the pennant-winning St. Louis Maroons (who won 94 of their 113 regular season games, and bested the second-place Cincinnati Outlaw Reds by a whoppi

We're taking a few days of early summer vacation this week - but not before sitting down for a very fun interview with pro football enthusiast and friend-of-the-show Arnie Chapman - as a guest on his popular Sports History Network podcast "The Football History Dude." Tim and Arnie dive into some of the most memorable football-related episodes of "Good Seats Still Available" thus far - and wax nostalgic on mutually favorite former circuits like the World Football League, the first XFL, the World League of American Football, and the original USFL, among others. Please enjoy this conversation we recorded a few weeks back - and be sure to check out all the other great podcasts across the Sports History Network!

While more than a few generations of NBA fans believe the Sacramento Kings franchise began its life when the team played (and lost) its very first exhibition game against the Los Angeles Clippers at the warehouse-converted ARCO Arena (I) on October 25, 1985 - serious students of the game know better.   Indeed, a very rich and colorful series of previous incarnations dating back to nearly a century earlier - beginning as the primordial semi-pro "industrial league" Rochester (NY) Seagrams in the mid-1920s, and evolving into the NBL, BAA and eventually NBA versions of the Rochester Royals - historically confirm the Kings as one of the sport's oldest consecutively run professional outfits.   Gerry Schultz (Cincinnati's Basketball Royalty: A Brief History) joins the podcast this week to delve into the club's pivotal, and, at times, legendary, 15-year stint as the Cincinnati Royals (1957-72) - when the franchise and the league both came of age by virtue of the play of some of the NBA's greatest all-time performers

"Dave Bancroft should not be in the Hall of Fame."   That's how this week's guest Tom Alesia's new book "Beauty at Short: Dave Bancroft, the Most Unlikely Hall of Famer and His Wild Times in Baseball's First Century" starts - a curious way to begin the first (and only) biography of one of Cooperstown's most underappreciated inductees.   A competent, if not unremarkable major league shortstop (Philadelphia Phillies, New York Giants, Boston Braves, Brooklyn Robins), and manager (Braves; All-American Girls Professional Baseball League Chicago Colleens, South Bend Blue Sox) - Bancroft was well short on statistical credentials (e.g., .279 lifetime batting average; just 32 career HRs; .406 managerial winning percentage) to warrant obvious inclusion.   But his solid play with the two-time World Series winning Giants in the early 1920s came in handy when two of his fellow players from those teams - Bill Terry and Frankie Frisch - became influential members of the Hall's Veterans' Committee in the late 1960s, and squi