Sports Studies

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  The Kentucky Derby: How the Run for the Roses Became America’s Premier Sporting Event

  Each year on the first Saturday in May, the world turns its attention to the twin spires of Churchill Downs for the high-stakes excitement of the “greatest two minutes in sports,” the Kentucky Derby. No American sporting event can claim the history, tradition, or pageantry that the Kentucky Derby holds. For more than 130 years, spectators have been fascinated by the magnificent horses that run the Louisville track. Thoroughbreds such as Secretariat and Barbaro have earned instant international fame, along with jockeys such as Isaac Murphy, Ron Turcotte, and Calvin Borel. The Kentucky Derby: How the Run for the Roses ...Read More

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  How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders

  The conflicts of the Civil War continued long after the conclusion of the war: jockeys and Thoroughbreds took up the fight on the racetrack. A border state with a shifting identity, Kentucky was scorned for its violence and lawlessness and struggled to keep up with competition from horse breeders and businessmen from New York and New Jersey. As part of this struggle, from 1865 to 1910 the social and physical landscape of Kentucky underwent a remarkable metamorphosis, resulting in the gentile, beautiful, and quintessentially southern Bluegrass region of today. This book explores the post-Civil War world of Thoroughbred racing, before ...Read More

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  Thirteen Women Strong: The Making of a Team

  In 1974, Nancy Winstel joined the women’s college basketball team at Northern Kentucky University as a walk-on. She had little basketball experience, never having played on a high school team—her high school didn’t even have girl’s basketball. Despite her inexperience, Winstel served NKU as a talented student athlete, but her legacy didn’t end there. Appointed head coach at NKU in 1983, she gained a reputation as one of the most successful coaches in women’s college basketball history with more than 500 wins. Winstel garnered these victories in an athletic landscape vastly different from the one she knew as an NKU ...Read More

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  Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951

  With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history.

  At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on ...Read More

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  The Winning Tradition: A History of Kentucky Wildcat Basketball

  In its 95-year history, the Kentucky Wildcats have won more games than any other college basketball team. Their winning percentage is the highest in the country. They share the record for the most 20-win seasons. They are second in all-time number one rankings. And despite no longer holding the record for winningest coach, Adolph Rupp will always be a giant in the pantheon of college basketball.

  When The Winning Tradition first appeared in 1984, it was the first complete history of the Wildcat basketball program. Bert Nelli pointed out that, contrary to the accepted mythology, Adolph Rupp arrived at a ...Read More

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  The Longest Shot: Lil E. Tee and the Kentucky Derby

  On the first Saturday in May every year in Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after 5:30 PM, a new horse attains racing immortality. The Kentucky Derby is like no other race, and its winners are the finest horses in the world. Covered in rich red roses, surrounded by flashing cameras and admiring crowds, these instant celebrities bear names like Citation, Secretariat, Spectacular Bid, and Seattle Slew. They’re worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But in 1992, a funny thing happened on the way to the roses. The rattling roar of 130,000 voices tailed off into a high, hollow shriek as the horses ...Read More

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  Before Big Blue: Sports at the University of Kentucky, 1880-1940

  In the heart of the Bluegrass, basketball is king of collegiate athletics. But it wasn't always so. Before Big Blue chronicles the early history of organized sports at the University of Kentucky, from the tenuous beginnings under student leadership, through the early scandals, financial instability, and clashes with administration, to the Purge of 1938 that paved the way for basketball's ascendancy.

  Once upon a time in Lexington, football ruled the athletic department. In the 1890s and 1900s the most intense competition was with crosstown rival Transylvania University. The annual Thanksgiving Day game was the biggest event of the season, and ...Read More

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  Hounds in the Morning: Sundry Sports of Merry England

  Across the rolling countryside of Regency England sound the call of the horn and the chorus of hounds, as huntsmen, hounds, and horses tear across fields and leap fencerows in ardent pursuit of Reynard.

  In a field outside London, two brawny men strip to the waist and prepare to batter each other to a pulp for the pleasure of the Fancy—the hundreds of boxing fans who have ridden from all over England to see and bet on the illegal match.

  And through the streets of a country town, the lads rough-and-tumble in a wildly joyous game of football, while the ...Read More