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We revisit the endlessly fascinating World Football League - and its enigmatic founder/first commissioner Gary Davidson - with ESPN.com senior writer Ryan Hockensmith ("The Renegade Who Took On the NFL [And the NBA and the NHL]").   Drawing on recent interviews with Davidson, former NFL defectors Larry Csonka & Paul Warfield, and previous podcast guests Howard Baldwin & Upton Bell, Hockensmith delves into some of the more memorable (and a few of the truly unbelievable) historical moments in the WFL's brief mid-1970s existence - all one-and-a-half seasons of it.   The tales are tall, but the history is real - and Hockensmith makes it seem as fresh and vivid as the original events themselves nearly 50 years after its flashy debut and quickly spectacular flameout.

Hollywood film producer (Ray; The Game of Their Lives; Sudden Death) and original New England/Hartford Whalers founder/owner Howard Baldwin (Slim and None: My Wild Ride from the WHA to the NHL and All the Way to Hollywood) returns after a three-year absence to help fill in some of the gaps left over from Episode 100, and to dish on "new" territory from his hard-to-believe career, including: The contagious indefatigable spirit of WHA founder Dennis Murphy Who really paid for Bobby Hull's headline-grabbing contract (and who didn't) How Houston and Cincinnati went from being "in" the June 1978 WHA-NHL "merger," to being "out" of the senior league's "expansion" a year later The early 1990s saga of the HC CSKA Moscow "Red Army" team (aka the "Russian Penguins") Why the way to San Jose stopped first in Pittsburgh and then Minnesota; AND The World Football League's (almost) "Boston Bulls"

With the rebooted (though still potentially trademark-infringing) USFL now in full swing, we take a look back at one of the clubs from the original version that didn't make the cut this time around - the Washington Federals.   Washington Post sports reporter Jake Russell ("As the USFL Restarts, A Look Back at the Washington Federals") takes us inside his pursuit to decode the numerous curiosities of one of the first league's poorest-performing franchises - both on the field (a 7-22 record over two seasons), and in the stands (the USFL's second-worst average home attendances each year at venerable RFK Stadium).   Snakebitten from the start by: an initial owner who instead swapped for a franchise in Birmingham, AL; a convoluted, decision-slowing three-company joint venture/limited-partnership ownership structure; and a newly ascendant Redskins team celebrating its first NFL title in 41 years just weeks before the new team's debut - the Federals' journey in the USFL was beset by revenue shortfalls, poor timing a

It's the 60th year of New York Mets baseball, and we celebrate this week with a look back at the transformational multipurpose facility they called home for 45 seasons - including three of the club's four NL pennants and its only two World Series championships - Shea Stadium.   Matthew Silverman (Shea Stadium Remembered: The Mets, The Jets, and Beatlemania) takes us back to the origin story behind the conceptually named "Flushing Meadow Park Municipal Stadium" - which began almost immediately after the Dodgers' and Giants' relocation to California in 1958 as a lure for a new expansion franchise to replace them.   Through the combined political efforts of New York City mayor Robert Wagner, city urban planning power broker Robert Moses, and Continental League founder (and future stadium namesake) William Shea, the Queens-based facility opened in 1964 as the mutual home of not only the NL expansion Mets, but also the newly reincarnated AFL football New York Jets (née Titans).   We delve into more than four decad

We take it hard to the tin this week, with a lively roundtable reminiscence of the oft-overlooked, but undeniably influential Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL) of 1978-81 - with four of its pioneering players that helped pave the way for today's flourishing female pro hoops scene.   Liz "Bandit" Galloway McQuitter (Chicago Hustle); Charlene McWhorter Jackson (Hustle, Washington Metros, Milwaukee Does, St. Louis Streak); Adrian Mitchell-Newell (Hustle, Streak; LPBA Southern California Breeze); and episode 28 guest "Machine Gun" Molly Bolin Kazmer (Iowa Cornets, San Francisco Pioneers; Breeze; WABA Columbus Minks), join for an intimate discussion about the rapid rise, untimely fall, and heartening modern-day rediscovery of the WBL - catalyzed by their collective involvement in Legends of the Ball, a new nonprofit dedicated to preserving the foundational history of the league and all that's come because of it.

Baseball historian, Minnesota Twins official scorer and Episode 114 guest Stew Thornley ("Metropolitan Stadium: Memorable Games at Minnesota's Diamond on the Prairie"), returns for a fond look back at the semi-iconic structure that helped secure "major league" status for the Twin Cities in the early 1960s.   Known simply as "The Met" by area locals (or even the "Old Met" to distinguish from the downtown Minneapolis Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome that effectively replaced it in 1982), Bloomington's Metropolitan Stadium opened in April of 1956 with the stated hope of luring a Major League Baseball franchise to the region - just as the sport was beginning to chart its modern-era manifest destiny.   While ultimately luring Calvin Griffith's Washington Senators to become the Twins in 1961 - as well as the expansion NFL football Vikings that same year - the Met was mostly the exclusive home of the minor league American Association Minneapolis Millers for its first five years of existence, save for a handful of annua

Long-time Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) contributor and "Mover and Shaker: Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers, and Baseball's Westward Expansion" author Andy McCue joins the podcast to discuss his provocative new book "Stumbling Around the Bases" - a persuasive account of the American League's consistently haphazard approach to expansion and franchise relocation during baseball's modern era: ​"​From the late 1950s to the 1980s, baseball’s American League mismanaged integration and expansion, allowing the National League to forge ahead in attendance and prestige. While both leagues had executive structures that presented few barriers to individual team owners acting purely in their own interests, it was the American League that succumbed to infighting—which ultimately led to its disappearance into what we now call Major League Baseball. "Stumbling Around the Bases" is the story of how the American League fell into such a disastrous state, struggling for decades to escape its nadir and, when it fin

​A pro football​ player who protests against the actions of his government, is shunned by ​the league establishment, and eventually ​winds up out of the ​game, working for social justice. ​ No, it's not Colin Kaepernick​; it's the 1960s NFL saga of a former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker named Dave Meggyesy.   A 17th-round draft pick in 1963 out of Syracuse, Meggyesy was a steady presence and reliable performer for seven mostly mediocre Cardinal seasons (save for a 1964 season-ending Bert Bell Benefit [aka "NFL Playoff"] Bowl victory over Green Bay) - when​ he quit at the height of his career​, ​repulsed by a game he saw rife with problems and injustices, and a nation fighting an increasingly futile war in Vietnam.   In 1970, he wrote​ a bombshell exposé of a book called "​Out of Their League​"​ – a blistering assault on football and ​the institutions that enabled it - in which ​he detailed ​multiple ills of the game, many of which still exist today.  ​   Racism, corruption, militarism, institutionalized viol

[A September 2017 archive re-release favorite with the production wizard behind behind early network TV coverage of the World Football League & North American Soccer League of the 1970s!] On January 20, 1968, a frenzied crowd of 52,693 packed the Houston Astrodome to witness the #2-ranked University of Houston Cougars nip the #1 (and previously undefeated) UCLA Bruins in a college basketball spectacle that legendarily became the sport’s “Game of the Century.”  In addition to the record-sized gate, it was the first-ever college game to be televised nationally in prime time – and it was sports entrepreneur Eddie Einhorn’s scrappy little independent network of affiliated stations called the TVS Television Network that brought it to millions of TV viewers.  Calling all the shots from the production truck was veteran TV sports director Howard Zuckerman – who quickly became the backbone for the fledgling ad hoc network’s subsequent coverage of not only college hoops, but also two of the most colorful pro sports

Pat Jordan grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut where, in the mid-1950s, he became a highly pursued pro baseball prospect as a young pitching phenom in local Little League and as a high school ace at Fairfield Prep.   On July 9, 1959, after being pursued by more than a dozen Major League Baseball organizations (MLB's first amateur draft didn't start until 1965), Jordan signed a then-record $36,000 "bonus baby" bounty to join the National League's Milwaukee Braves - where he reported to the McCook Braves of the Class D Nebraska State League, playing alongside future big leaguers Phil Niekro and Joe Torre.   Despite being one of the minors' hardest-throwing pitchers at the time, Jordan floundered through three seasons across obscure Braves posts such as Waycross (GA), Davenport (IA), Eau Claire (WI) and Palatka (FL), and by the end of 1961, was out of the game for good - a victim of injury, hubris and the realities of adulthood.   Baseball's loss was ultimately sports journalism's gain, as Jordan pivoted hard into

We traverse a fascinating litany of top-tier North American professional indoor soccer leagues with pioneering player, record-setting coach and now, current Major Arena Soccer League (MASL) commissioner Keith Tozer.   In a pro career spanning more than 40 years, Tozer has literally done it all in the indoor game: Playing on original Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL) sides like the Cincinnati Kids, Hartford Hellions and Pittsburgh Spirit; Dually playing/coaching for the American Indoor Soccer Association's (AISA)  Louisville Thunder and Atlanta Attack; and Coaching both the last two seasons of the MISL's Los Angeles Lazers and, legendarily, winning six titles in 22 seasons across four leagues with the Milwaukee Wave Tozer is not only the winningest coach in indoor pro soccer history (amassing over 700 wins), but one of the most successful overall US soccer coaches of all time.    Buckle up for a wild ride across the rocky terrain of professional indoor soccer - including an outdoor detour with the American

We reminisce about the original Arena Football League and its curious dalliances with the New York metropolitan area, with veteran Newsday sports writer/columnist Gregg Sarra - who not only regularly covered franchises like the 1997-98 New York CityHawks and the Long Island-based New York Dragons (2001-08), but also even played an actual game with one of them - and lived to tell (and write) about it.   After beat-reporting two woeful seasons' worth of CityHawks games at the "World's Most Famous Arena" (Madison Square Garden had hastily lobbied the league for its own expansion club when it got wind of a team coming to the nearby New Jersey Meadowlands: the Red Dogs) - Sarra was both surprised and giddy when he heard yet another team would be coming to the market - this time to his hometown Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum.   The Dragons were actually the relocated Iowa Barnstormers (1995-2000) - a smaller-market sensation owned by league founder (and episodes 43 & 44 guest) Jim Foster - who sold the fra

It's another bucket-list conversation with one of Tim's favorite players from the legendary New York Cosmos of the original North American Soccer League - defender extraordinaire​ (and de facto club keeper-of-the-flame) Werner Roth.   A childhood émigré of his native Yugoslavia in the mid-1950s, Roth spent the bulk of his youth in New York City - cutting his semi-professional teeth in the heavily ethnic, regionally competitive and historically influential German American Soccer League with German-Hungarian SC - where he eventually caught the attention of the new local NASL expansion franchise in 1971.   Roth joined the Cosmos the next year as one of its precious North American players, helping the club secure its first-ever league title and quickly establishing himself as a reliably solid defensive back whose presence could be counted on - especially as the team's ambitions grew.   By 1977, Roth had become captain of a high-wattage international superstar lineup featuring the likes of Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer,

[We dig out from last week's major winter storm with a fan-favorite Archive Re-Release from 2018!] By the summer of 1959, the absence of two former National League franchises from what was once a vibrant New York City major league baseball scene was obvious – and even the remaining/dominant Yankees couldn’t fully make up for it.  Nor could that season’s World Series championship run of the now-Los Angeles Dodgers – a bittersweet victory for jilted fans of the team’s Brooklyn era.  Fiercely determined to return a National League team to the city, mayor Robert Wagner enlisted the help of a Brooklyn-based attorney named William Shea to spearhead an effort to first convince a current franchise to relocate – as the American League’s Braves (Boston to Milwaukee, 1953), Browns (St. Louis to Baltimore, 1954), and A’s (Philadelphia to Kansas City, 1955) had recently done.  When neither Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or even MLB Commissioner Ford Frick, could be convinced by the opportunity, Shea and team moved

Fresh off his appearance on last month's Year-End Holiday Roundtable Spectacular, fellow defunct sports enthusiast Steve Holroyd returns to the show for a dive into the deep end of the "forgotten sports" pool, with a look back at the little-remembered, but ahead-of-its-time Pro Cricket from 2004.   An attempt to quickly capitalize on the venerable sport's faster-paced Twenty20 format launched in England a year earlier, Pro Cricket was essentially a rogue creation formed outside of cricket's US and international sanctioning bodies - featuring eight teams in a three-month summer season played largely in minor league baseball stadiums across the country.   Crowds were sparse, mainstream sports media attention was minimal, television coverage (Dish Network PPV) was limited, and sustaining funds (supposedly three seasons' worth) were quickly exhausted.    Yet, the play was surprisingly competitive (a smattering of international stars played; the San Francisco Freedom defeated the New Jersey Fire for the only titl

After hiding in plain sight for the better part of five years, we finally take an initial swing at the deeply fascinating story of baseball's original "lovable losers" - the St. Louis Browns.   St. Louis native and keeper of the flame Ed Wheatley ("St. Louis Browns: The Story of a Beloved Team" & "Baseball in St. Louis: From Little Leagues to Major Leagues") knows a thing or two about this most forlorn, but curiously beloved American League franchise of yore (1902-53); as the President of the St. Louis Browns Historical Society, it is his passion and duty to burnish the memory and celebrate the contributions of the Brownies - despite its half-century of mostly forgettable on-field performance.   Before organized baseball forced then-owner Bill Veeck to sell the club to a Baltimore syndicate in 1953 to ultimately become today's similarly lamentable Orioles, the Browns battled the cross-town Cardinals for St. Louis' baseball attention - often at the city's venerable Sportsman's Park, which they both claimed

As we continue to debate the general wisdom of resurrecting the intellectual property of the original short-lived 1980s version of the United States Football League - as well as question the viability of launching yet another spring pro football circuit - our attention this week turns to one of the eight chosen "franchises" for the new USFL launching this April.   Of course, memorably well-supported originals like the Tampa Bay Bandits, New Jersey Generals, Birmingham Stallions, and the only two clubs to ever win USFL championships - the Stars (once in Philadelphia, once in Baltimore) and the Michigan Panthers - make some semblance of sense.   But the lamentable one-year Pittsburgh Maulers?   Longtime sports promotions executive Tom Rooney - nephew of famed Pittsburgh Steelers founder Art Rooney, and former Maulers front office executive - joins for a nostalgic trip back to Three Rivers Stadium ("One and Dumb: The Story of the Maulers" from Three Rivers Stadium: A Confluence of Champions) and shares just why

We geek out this week with Sports Reference, LLC founder and president Sean Forman ("The Negro Leagues are Major Leagues: Essays and Research for Overdue Recognition") for an inside look into the complex and detailed process of integrating the statistics of the recently elevated Negro Leagues into the official records of Major League Baseball.   Advocated for decades by countless baseball researchers and historians - and buoyed by MLB's long-overdue proclamation in December 2020 that seven of Black baseball's segregated professional leagues between 1920-1948 finally deserved "major league" status - the incorporation of Negro League player data into the sport's overall statistical record has been both swift and meticulous.   Forman talks us through how the company's vaunted Baseball Reference team partnered with Negro League stats specialist Seamheads.com to onboard and combine data from the Negro National League (I) (1920–1931); the Eastern Colored League (1923–1928); the American Negro League (1929); the

Valdosta State University Professor of History and African American Studies Thomas Aiello ("Dixieball: Race and Professional Basketball in the Deep South") joins our first podcast of the New Year - with an intriguing look into the tortuous history of pro hoops in America's Deep South.   While NBA fans take today's Hawks and Pelicans as historical "givens," their very existences belie the Sunbelt South's complicated economic and social relationship with professional sports during the modern era - especially with respect to basketball.    We dig into the sport's tenuous first professional incursions into both New Orleans (the ABA's charter Buccaneers) and Atlanta (the NBA's relocated St. Louis Hawks) during the culturally and politically charged late-1960s - as well as why it took so long for those franchises to even materialize in the first place.   ​Aiello also takes us through the similarly challenged exploits of the NBA's New Orleans Jazz (today domiciled in Utah) of the 1970s - who, despite the dazzli

[More holiday fun with a re-release of a fan favorite episode from January 2018!] We conclude our two-part journey into the early history of the Arena Football League with founder and inventor Jim Foster, who recounts some of the most notable events of the league’s formative years – including a memorable 1987 “demonstration season” featuring: The February debut “Showcase Game” in suburban Chicago’s Rosemont Horizon between the hometown Bruisers and the Miami Vise – highlights of which later dominated ESPN’s SportsCenter;   A return to the Horizon for the first-ever nationally televised league match four months later (after a non-televised inaugural game the night before in Pittsburgh) – an overtime thriller that left fans, ESPN broadcasters, and league officials scrambling for the newly-written rule book; The league’s first “Arena Bowl” championship game (won by the visiting Denver Dynamite) in front of a sold-out Pittsburgh Civic Center and a live national TV audience; AND US patent filings (officially gran