Category: Sports
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The Why of a Million Golfers
In 1923, golf was quickly becoming one of America’s most popular sports, as it remains today. Will Americans in a century look back to the current moment as the similar rise of pickleball? Here’s how M.B. Levick described the newfound craze for New York Times Magazine in 1923: This season there are 2,200 golf links in…
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A regular season sports game as a NYT front page headline
Ostensibly, the focus of this website is to highlight the most interesting articles from the New York Times Magazine 100 years ago to the week. But when going back to the November 6, 1921 issue, something on the front page caught my eye. And since I determined it was more interesting than anything from that issue’s actual…
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‘Heroes by Any Other Name’
This 1921 article was already calling Babe Ruth a “legend,” even though he hadn’t even won his first MVP award yet. I think most people are hero worshippers, don’t you? Only nowadays they do not pick their heroes from the ranks of soldiers and senators. Five years of war gave us no outstanding figure, but…
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The Popularizing of Polo
This 1921 article said polo was gaining popularity, with 5,000 attending that year’s national championship in Philadelphia. At 2019’s last pre-pandemic championship in Palm Beach, the crowd was a “near-sellout”… at a 1,640-seat venue. What went wrong over the past century? According to this article by Michael Barr for Texas Escapes, tracing the history of the…
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College Sports and Motherhood
In 1921, some people argued, letting young women play college sports would make them worse mothers down the line: The Victorian girl was a better mother than our modern feminine athletes. Every girl, it seems, has a large store of vital and nervous energy, upon which to draw in the great crisis of motherhood. If…
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Woman at the Ring Side
Boxing was illegalized in New York state in 1896, then legalized in 1911, then re-illegalized in 1917, then re-legalized for the final time in 1920. And this time, something was new: women were attending the matches. Spurred on partly by the previous year’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women voting rights previously reserved…
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Harding, Baseball Fan
Future President Warren Harding’s “front porch campaign” of 1920 rendered him unable to attend a Major League Baseball game, as he usually did each summer. So on September 2, they brought a game to him. The Chicago Cubs came to Harding’s hometown of Marion, Ohio to play an exhibition game against a semi-pro local team,…
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Tennis, A World Sport Epidemic
In 1920, one of the fastest-growing U.S. sports was tennis. From 2010 to 2018, though, the sport’s U.S. participation rate declined -5%. First, 1920. This contemporary article, which uses the spelling “racquet” when describing the equipment, says tennis is “the game that… is gaining popularity more rapidly than ever.” The 1920 article’s estimate of “more…
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Making Men Mentally Fit for Football
Could going out and goofing off the night before a big sports game help players perform better? Cornell football coach Al Sharpe thought so, and tested his theory before the big 1913 rivalry game versus UPenn. Twenty times in the twenty years prior to the then-approaching battle the teams of these two great universities had…
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Betting on Horse Races, Then and Now
In 1919, horse race betting was banned in every state. How times have changes. Horse betting is now legal in 41 states. If you’re wondering, what are the places where it still remains illegal? Interestingly, it doesn’t appear to fall along partisan lines, with a curious mix of red states, blue states, and swing states still…