The Big Time

Starred review from October 9, 2023
The 1970s heralded the “emergence of spectator sports as an ever-expanding mainstream phenomenon, as well as... remarkable changes in the way athletes were paid, how they played, and how they were perceived,” according to this invigorating history. Sports journalist MacCambridge (’69 Chiefs) chronicles how sports became big business, noting that pro players in the late 1960s made so little they took off-season jobs (“The Pistons’ Dave Bing worked as a bank teller”) before a series of 1970s labor battles secured pro basketball, baseball, and football players a greater share of ballooning profits. Offering vibrant accounts of the decade’s most significant contests and their social impact, MacCambridge examines the boom in women’s sports in the context of the 1973 tennis match between Bobby Riggs, described here as “slouching into middle age” in his “World War II–era black horn-rimmed glasses,” and Billie Jean King, who was “at once strong and feminine, resplendent in a sequined multicolored dress.” Elsewhere, MacCambridge sharply analyzes the 1971 fight between the “boastful, draft-dodging” Muhammad Ali and the “sullen but respectful” Joe Frazier as a proxy battle over respectability politics (“Whom you were rooting for often said something about the sort of person you were”). Impressive in scope and vividly told, this is a winner. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review had the wrong year for the Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier fight analyzed by the author.

October 23, 2023

Caught between the idealism of the 1960s, its youth-led counterculture movement, and the greed-is-good ethos of the 1980s, the 1970s are often overlooked as a decade of change. Journalist MacCambridge (Chuck Noll: His Life's Work) delves into the quirky details of that time period with regard to U.S. athletics. Take, for example, the purple skates worn by the Los Angeles Kings hockey team and the American Basketball Association's introduction of red, white, and blue basketballs, though some readers may believe MacCambridge missed exploring some particularly galvanizing historical moments in sports, such as hockey's 1972 Summit Series between Canada and the USSR. His book emphasizes that changes in the sports world during the 1970s mirrored societal ones. The work shows how women, via Title IX, gained access to areas that had been beyond their grasp, how the popularity of sports grew due to the power of television, and how the Super Bowl, the Battle of the Sexes tennis match, and other events created shared societal experiences on an unprecedented scale. The 1970s was also the first decade of millionaire celebrity athletes, and this time period showcased athletes working together to form stronger labor unions and gain free agency. VERDICT A valid and solid work on a decade of significant changes in the world of sports.--Brian Renvall

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