Upon Further Review

March 5, 2018
In his first book, Pesca, host of The Gist podcast, collects lively and informative essays on possible alternatives to some of the most notable moments in sports history. The entries come from sports columnists, historians, documentarians, and fans, and “propose hypotheticals that sparked the imagination, that opened the door to a hidden history or set off a plausible chain reaction we might not have even considered.” Highlights include Shira Springer’s “What If the United States Had Boycotted Hitler’s Olympics?” in which she presents a convincing case that a boycott would have been better for the 1936 Olympics, immediately setting the sporting event on “a more progressive” course. In “What If Muhammad Ali Had Gotten His Draft Deferment?” Leigh Montville convincingly argues that Ali’s time away from boxing in 1966 “was the most important time of all”—that without his image of “challenging authority,” Ali’s career would have been “perfunctory, simply about boxing.” In one of the best essays, “What If Nat ‘Sweetwater’ Clifton’s Pass Hadn’t Gone Awry?” Claude Johnson takes a look at racism in the early days of professional basketball with Nat Clifton playing in 1948 on the New York Rens, an all-black pro basketball team (Clifton’s errant pass caused the Rens to lose the game, and perhaps a franchise spot on the newly formed NBA). Enlightening and entertaining, Pesca’s collection of hypothetical sports outcomes gives sports fans much food for thought.

March 15, 2018
More than 30 what-if stories that reinvent sports history, and perhaps the greater national history.Former NPR sports reporter Pesca, host of the Slate podcast The Gist, asked his contributors to give the full trajectory of the what-if, not just how one game may have played out had Bill Buckner not booted a routine ground ball or Drew Bledsoe not gotten hurt and given way to Tom Brady. The author wants the bigger picture: how it might have changed the sport, a life, the politics of a nation, or paved over major cultural roadblocks, like racism. That is a tall order for rather short fantasies--roughly five to 10 pages--but a surprising number pull it off. "What If Nixon Had Been Good at Football?" by Julian Zelizer, is a wonderful little psycho-sporting profile that presents Nixon as a confident, honest, comfortable-in-his-own-skin man. "What If Roger Bannister Trained Today?" asks Liam Boylan-Pett. Instead of squeezing in a few hours per week between medical school classes, what if he had followed today's rigorous training regimens? Probably a new world record. What if Muhammad Ali had gotten his draft deferment? What if professional football were invented today? With what we know about head trauma, we might have very different play and players. For those readers who are intimate with a particular event--e.g., what if Billie-Jean King had lost to the huckster Bobby Riggs? What if Brady hadn't stepped in for the injured Bledsoe?--these counterfactual stories may feel thin on the bone. There are, for instance, lots of reasons besides Brady that the New England Patriots are the dynasty they have become, and it does feel like coaches, other players, and the general state of the sport at the time get short shrift. Other notable contributors include Leigh Montville, Jeremy Schaap, Will Leitch, and Mary Pilon.Some quibbles aside, this is sports escapism brought to new and entertaining heights.

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April 15, 2018
What if Broadway Joe had failed to deliver on his audacious prediction of a Jets victory in Super Bowl III? What if the Dodgers had remained in Brooklyn? What if Bill Walton's knees had not given out early in his NBA career? Though difficulty in accessing portals to alternate universes may prevent readers from checking the veracity of these 30 speculative essays, the imaginative authors Pesca has enlisted (mostly from among sports journalists) help readers understand current realities in the world of sports by showing how quite different realities could easily have developed under different but quite conceivable circumstances. Even when the essays focus largely on a single sports star (such as Tom Brady or Wayne Gretzky), their what-if conjectures open onto fundamental questions about the character of entire teams, leagues, sports, and fan bases. The essay contemplating the hypothetical effects of an American boycott of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin even compels readers to consider the potent influence of sports on geopolitics. A thought-provoking venture into sports' road-not-taken possibilities.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)