Libsyn Directory

334.5: The National Bowling League – With Dr. Jake Schmidt [ARCHIVE RE-RELEASE]

Release Date: 01/29/2024

347.5: The North American Soccer League - With Paul Gardner

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We celebrate the 94th birthday of legendary Soccer America columnist Paul Gardner (; ) with this special archive re-release (and our 6th-ever episode!) from 2017. The universally acknowledged "dean" of American soccer writers waxes nostalgic on his unlikely journey from fledgling British pharmacist to the States' most persistently influential commentator on the "beautiful game." Gardner: Recounts the chaotic formation of the modern professional game in the U.S. during the 1960s; Recalls how ambitious sports entrepreneurs like the International Soccer League’s Bill Cox, and greedy...

347: Powering Forward - With Dean Tolson

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During the late 1960s, Dean Tolson ("") emerged as a standout prep basketball talent during his junior and senior years at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri. His prowess on the court attracted the attention of a bevy of college recruiters, leading him to accept a full scholarship offer from the nearby University of Arkansas. Despite literally not knowing how to read or write, Tolson defied significant odds, and became one of the most renowned players in Razorbacks history. In 1974, Tolson was drafted by both the NBA's Seattle Supersonics and the ABA's New York Nets -...

346: Roller Derby's Los Angeles Thunderbirds - With Scott Stephens

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It's our first journey into the chaotically exciting history of "professional" roller derby with former skater and long-time keeper-of-the-flame Scott Stephens ("). From the moment he laced up his first pair of roller skates at age six in mid-1960s Los Angeles, roller derby became more than just a sport to Stephens – it became his passion. In the midst of the craze sweeping through the city, Stephens found himself captivated by the electrifying energy of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, whose thrilling matches were locally (and nationally) televised, and whose star performers rivaled the fame...

345: From Vancouver to Memphis - With Łukasz Muniowski

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It's a special mea culpa episode this week, as we welcome back Szczecin University (Poland) history professor and Łukasz Muniowski () for a deep dive into the drama of the NBA's Vancouver Grizzlies move to Memphis in 2001 - and an assessment of the winners and losers some 23+ years since. While Muniowski's current title on the topic () has been out since October, your humble host not only lost track of the book's publishing date, but also the entire audio file of our conversation (originally recorded back in August 2023) - until a recent cloud backup surfaced a redundant...

344.5: The NFL’s 1943 “Steagles” - With Matt Algeo [ARCHIVE RE-RELEASE]

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[A dip into the archives for a one of our first-ever episodes from 2017 - by request!] Author Matt Algeo () joins Tim Hanlon all the way from Maputo, Mozambique to discuss the marriage of convenience that literally saved the National Football League from collapse in 1943. Algeo describes how a desperate Art Rooney scrambled to save his Pittsburgh Steelers franchise, depleted by wartime military call-ups; how a hastily assembled squad of ragtag draft rejects practiced football at night while maintaining defense jobs by day (including one player who worked on the eventual war-ending Manhattan...

344: The Evolution of Sports Media - With David Bockino

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Former ESPN ad researcher, and current Elon University professor of communications and sport management David Bockino () helps us trace the evolution of the sports media industry - with historical points of interest both obvious (e.g., the 1958 NFL Championship Game; "Sports Illustrated" magazine; ABC's "Monday Night Football;" the 1979 launch of cable's ESPN); and subtle (1967's live multinational "Our World" TV broadcast; World Series Cricket; 1981's short-lived Enterprise Radio Network; AudioNet/Broadcast.com; and virtual graphics pioneer SportVision). + + + SUPPORT THE...

343: Baseball History Landmarks - With Chris Epting

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We reach back into the vaunted Good Seats library stacks this week for a deep dive into one of Tim's favorite sports reference books - - with its (prodigious non-fiction) author . Now in its third edition, Roadside is everything you'd imagine from the title: a detailed, geographic cataloging of over 500 important events in North American baseball history, including historical data, trivia, photographs, and lore - highlighting birthplaces of baseball legends, ballparks, museums and halls of fame, final resting places, and dozens of former locations no longer standing. Join...

342.5 [PROMO DROP] "Ways To Win"

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Sharing something special, an episode of the new podcast "Ways to Win" - where coaches Craig Robinson and John Calipari use their on-court wisdom to solve off-court problems. In this first episode (recorded before the start of the NCAA basketball tournament!), there's no better way to kick off March Madness than with President Barack Obama (and Craig’s favorite brother-in-law), who drops by to break down his bracket. Find out who’s in his Final Four and how far he thinks Coach Cal’s Wildcats will go (even if Cal doesn't want to know). Plus, the guys chat about how Cal's preparing his...

342: "Boston Ball" - With Clayton Trutor

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We bust some brackets this week in honor of the NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, with a look back at the old East Coast Athletic Conference and the coaching cradle of city of Boston - with return () guest Clayton Trutor (""). Before the formation of the original Big East Conference in 1979, much of DI college basketball in the US Northeast and Mid-Atlantic was part of a loose patchwork of small conferences and independents that collectively fed into the not-really-a-conference ECAC umbrella for post-season playoffs, helping winnow at-large bids for a still-small NCAA...

341: "Pro" Wrestling's Origin Story - With Jon Langmead

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We squint hard this week for a look into the story of American "professional" wrestling's formative years - with pop culture writer Jon Langmead (). Langmead takes us inside the raucous period roughly between the mid-1870s to the early-1940s - where genuine competitive wrestlers and opportunistic amusement-minded promoters (both heavily influenced by the country's booming carnival circuit) together codified the now modern-day conventions that transformed a legitimate, physically demanding sport into melodramatic mass entertainment. Central to Langmead's narrative is...

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[A dip into the archives for a fan favorite from 2019 - featuring a show-closing ode to the late, great 70s' TV game show "Celebrity Bowling"!]

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We hit the lanes this week to delve into the fascinating story of the nation’s first and only attempt at a professional team bowling league – a seemingly anachronistic idea by today’s standards, but a concept that made total sense in the early 1960s when pro bowling was in ascendance and the sport was seemingly everywhere on television.

Bowlers Journal columnist and historian J.R. “Dr. Jake” Schmidt (The Bowling Chronicles: Collected Writings of Dr. Jake) joins the podcast to lay out the curious backstory, short-lived season(s) and unwitting legacy of the National Bowling League (1960-62) – an ambitious, but altogether logical attempt to professionalize bowling in the style of America’s other major team sports, and capitalize on the big money purses beginning to fuel national TV competitions during the late 1950s.

Amidst a bevy of popular made-for-TV competitions that featured various takes on head-to-head play – like NBC’s weekly Championship Bowling, and primetime’s Make That Spare (ABC) and Jackpot Bowling (NBC) – the coast-to-coast NBL hoped to offer bowling professionals a city-based team format, replete with purposely-designed television-friendly arenas and boisterous fans.

Despite investment from deep-pocketed funders like AFL founder Lamar Hunt and oilman/Cotton Bowl creator J. Curtis Sanford (whose Dallas-based 72-lane Bronco Bowl set the standard for NBL facilities); a well-publicized draft (with then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson in attendance); and a novel scoring system that featured situational bonus points and wild-card substitutions, the NBL stumbled out of the gate devoid of the very thing it needed most to succeed – a national television contract.

Outfoxed by the nascent Pro Bowlers Association – which was simultaneously pioneering a laddered individual vs. individual national tour format with a similarly fledgling ABC-TV – the NBL had to rely solely on individual gates while trying to convince other networks to take notice. Early crowds were sparse to virtually non-existent, and most pros found the money, light workload and broad television exposure of the PBA’s “Pro Bowlers’ Tour” to be the better path to ply their wares.

It’s a tale of what might have been – and we “spare” no question in our pursuit of the story of this most intriguing of forgotten pro leagues!

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