Review: The Front Runner (2025)

By Brendan O'Meara

Fifty years?

Yes. Fifty years.

It has been a half-century since Steve Prefontaine died in an auto accident in Oregon in 1975. That means he'd be 74 in 2025.  

For those who weren't around yet to know who Steve Prefontaine was, it's tough to explain. He might have been one of the greatest runners ever produced by America. Steve, or as most people called him, "Pre," held almost all of the United States' records in distance running at one time or another. 

But it wasn't a case of what Prefontaine did. It was how he did it. Steve really was a front-runner. He usually took the lead in races rather quickly, and buried the hopes of the competition in virtually no time at all. None of this last-second sprint to the finish stuff for Prefontaine. Most of his races were well over well before that. It's almost as if he were saying, "Do you have what it takes to stay with me? No? Bye."

Prefontaine remains something of a legend in track circles, with some books and two movies covering his career. Now Brendan O'Meara has revisited that era with his comprehensive book, "The Front Runner."  

This starts at the beginning, with Prefontaine's family life. It sure sounds like it wasn't exactly a household filled with love and happiness. "Mommy Dearest" had nothing on Steve's mother, who used to beat him when he did something that was perceived to be wrong. Sometimes the mother asked her husband to take care of disciplinary business with a strap. Steve's older sister (nine years) often protected her little brother, taking the hits in his place.

It's easy to think of Frank Shorter while reading this. Shorter had what looked like a peaceful childhood from a distance, but the future Olympic marathon champion had a monster of a father who tried to abuse most of the residents of a small town. Running became an escape for Shorter and Prefontaine, as they literally could run away from their troubles - at least for a while. Were there many other runners who, pardon the expression, followed that path?

It took a little while for Prefontaine to figure out what sport would be a good fit for him once he reached the high school years. Eventually, though, Steve ended up in running, and - what do you know? - when he started winning races, the beatings stop. That sounds a particularly effective motivating force. Prefontaine quickly moved up the ladder, and by the time of high school graduation he was clearly on a different level than any one else in his native Coos Bay, Oregon - and perhaps most places in the country. 

By the time he arrived at the fabled running program at the University of Oregon with its legendary coach Bill Bowerman, Prefontaine was ready for the next step. Here's how good he was: Steve was on the cover of Sports Illustrated at the age of 19 in 1970. Prefontaine rampaged his way through the college ranks with the goal of reaching the Olympics. He did make the 1972 American team that went to Munich, and finished fourth in the 5,000 meters. That spot is always a good news/bad news spot. Fourth in the world in anything is very impressive, but no one remembers who finished fourth in an Olympic event. 

Prefontaine finished up his eligibility at Oregon after that, which must have been something of an anti-climax. Today he'd be making enough money from outside sources that he could continue to run competitively for many more years. But back in those primitive (or, if you prefer, just plain stupid) days, athletes in the so-called Olympic sports had strict rules about compensation or almost any kind. Most athletes had to get on with the rest of their lives by finding work, just to pay the bills. 

Prefontaine fought the old system as best he could, and caused a few cracks with his words and actions. Again, ever the front-runner. While his death in 1975 stopped his personal quest in that area, the Amateur Athletic Union lost most of its power to determine eligibility by the end of that decade. Remember the first rule of amateurism: it's a way to keep money out of the hands of the people who actually earned it. Maybe Prefontaine would have gone on to win an Olympic medal or set a world record, the two missing ingredients on his resume.  

Author Brendan O'Meara certainly put in an effort for this one. He found more than 100 people who sat down for interviews on the subject of Prefontaine, and mined a variety of other sources. Obviously some of the people who were part of Steve's life back then aren't around to talk about it now. But I can't say the finished product is missing anything obvious in that sense. 

"The Front Runner" portrays a man who in a sense could be called track and field's James Dean. Prefontaine and Dean were both big, charismatic stars as a young age who were taken from us too soon. The book might have lost a little of its potential audience after 50 years, but those in running circles who are looking for the full story will enjoy this thoroughly.

Four stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)

Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.

Review: Legends and Soles (2025)

By Sonny Vaccaro with Armen Keteyian

The cover of "Legends and Soles" raises an unusual question by the standards of autobiography. Who exactly is this "Sonny Vaccaro," the author of the book? 

That's not exactly an easy question to answer. Sonny was one of the great characters of the basketball world for decades, filling a variety of roles. He'd pop up in references to the game off the court, where he was quite influential in a number of ways. It takes a book to sort of answer the question of his identity, and this is that book.

Vaccaro grew up in the Pittsburgh area, and became something of a hustler in the sports world. That is to say, he put together a high school all-star basketball game that often attracted some of the best players in the country to participate. Vaccaro also used his "recruiting" talents for a basketball camp, in which top players squared off against each other while the nation's best coaches enjoyed the chance for "one-stop shopping" when it came to scouting and recruiting. 

After a while, Vaccaro knew everyone in the college basketball business. When Nike was just starting up and wanted to get into the apparel and shoe business for something other than track, Vaccaro became something of a representative for the company. Sonny seems to have gotten the idea that the way to start was to pay the coaches a fee and have them hand out free gear to the players. The coaches, who were relatively unpaid at the time, jumped at the chance. It was revolutionary. Nike got off to such a good start that it became the preeminent outfitter of college basketball teams in the country - much to the disappointment of the more established businesses in that area. Just Do It, indeed.

That eventually led to the biggest moment in Vaccaro's professional life. In 1984, Nike wanted to move into the area of player endorsements in a big way. The usual technique was to sign several players and hope one of them would break into the public eye. Vaccaro says he was the one that suggested the company go all in on one player, giving him the year's entire marketing budget. But it had to be a special player, and Vaccaro thought Michael Jordan was that player. He'd bet his job on it, he said.

Yeah, that worked out pretty well. There's a great story about how agent David Falk changed the terms of the deal with Nike in order to take more money in direct payments and less from royalties from a unique called "Air Jordan." Oops. That little contract change cost his client millions - not that Jordan was ever hurting from a financial  standpoint. The whole story received the Hollywood treatment in the movie "Air," which is quite watchable considering it's not exactly an action thriller.

Vaccaro and Nike eventually went their separate ways - in other words, Sonny was fired. He landed with another athletic goods company, Adidas, which was mostly connected with European soccer but had little presence over here. Vaccaro spent his time looking for the next big thing, and found one of them when he was still a ways from high school graduation. Kobe Bryant eventually signed with Adidas. Another star did get away, though, when LeBron James received a lower-than-expected offer from Vaccaro's bosses with Adidas in Germany and went to Nike. The two sides split up after that. 

Vaccaro did a little more marketing work, and then opted to spend his time working on a class action lawsuit against the NCAA. Ed O'Bannon was the lead plaintiff in the suit. It took a while, but O'Bannon and Company won. That opened the door to direct payments to college players, which has led to a massive change in college sports which is still sorting itself out years later. 

There is plenty of name-dropping here, as you might expect. A couple of generations of top players took part in Vaccaro's game. Sonny also made plenty of friends among the coaching fraternity, which you'd expect when you deliver money from almost nowhere. There also is some serious score-settling along the way, with Nike founder Phil Knight and basketball coach George Raveling (who was the best man at Vaccaro's second wedding before things between the two men fell apart). It's a little ugly to read this from someone who seems to have hugged every basketball name he's ever met, but it's part of the story - and it's his book.

People such as Vaccaro seem to work in the shadows a bit (that often happened to people who liked their gambling back then), and sometimes the truth can be a little cloudy. It is worth noting that Sonny's co-author is Armen Keteyian, who has an excellent reputation as a reporter. If Keteyian is involved, it seems more likely that the story is pretty close to the straight scoop.

Think of "Legends and Soles" this way: it definitely would be worthwhile to spend some time with Sonny over dinner, hearing his stories. As for those who couldn't figure out how to do that (including me), this is a good substitute. The audience for the book might be small, but it will entertain those who pick it up and zip through it.

Three stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)

Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.

Review: The Stith Brothers (2024)

By Sam Stith

A few things become immediately obvious after the first glance at this book. 

It's small. While it checks in at 145 listed pages, the actual type essentially ends at page 75. That's not much bang for the buck, even for those reading the paperback edition instead of the hard-cover version. Along those lines, it's about the only book I've seen where the odd-numbered pages are on the left side. 

It's about the only autobiography you'll ever read that is written in the third person. There are no quotes anywhere. Some of the type that goes with the photos in the back half require a microscope instead of reading glasses. 

As you might have guessed already, this is self-published - so some of this is understandable. The standards are a little different. 

More importantly, it's a little sad. Author Sam Stith has a good story to tell here, as he and his brother Tom turned out to be pioneers in a sense, that's not fully told. 

The Stith family grew up relatively poor in Emporia, North Carolina. Sam and Tom (born 18 months apart) had strike one thrown at them when they were infants when their father died. While the cause of death of listed as drowning, let's just say there's a good chance that a cause of the death in the early 1940s in the South might not be accidental. Sam's mother and grandmother did the best they could raising four children (there were two older girls in the family).

Eventually, the mother decided that the Old South was no place for a single parent, and everyone headed to New York City. There the brothers found time to pick up basketball, and discovered they were good at it. By junior high they were good enough to attract some attention, which helped them receive a scholarship at a private high school in Brooklyn. They integrated the school's basketball team in the process, and were all-New York City selections. Along the way, the mother and grandmother also died. The kids somehow banded together to get through each day. 

Sam and Tom were standouts at St. Francis Prep, and they both appreciated the help of the Franciscan order. When it came time to pick a college, they decided to pick another school run by the Franciscans. It was an odd choice in a sense. St. Bonaventure, in relatively tiny Olean south of Buffalo, was about as different a place from New York City as could be imagined. But the small school had a basketball tradition - although it was an all-white one at the time - and they signed up.

It worked out well. Tom Stith was a two-time consensus All-American for Bona, and brother Sam was quite good too. It was one of the great basketball eras in school history. Whenever the history of St. Bonaventure basketball comes up, Tom and Sam are mentioned. 

The brothers' basketball connections came to a rather abrupt end. Tom was the second overall pick by the New York Knicks in 1961, but came down with tuberculosis shortly after starting his career. Oddly, he never got much of a chance to play after recovering, even though Eddie Donovan, his college coach, had moved on to the same job with the Knicks. Sam was a late-round draft choice by Cincinnati in 1960, eventually floated to the Knicks for a brief time, and joined Tom in a minor league. Donovan acted in an enigmatic way toward Sam, just like he did toward Tom. He rarely even talked to them after they were done with Bona basketball. Sam still is looking for an explanation.     

Sam and Tom moved on from basketball, and both seemed to have good lives with happy families and good jobs. Tom died in 2010, but Sam is still around - with his own YouTube channel, of all things. 

That's the first half of the book in a nutshell. The rest of the publication has some photos and clippings, and some carry captions. But the pictures are really small in many cases, with unused white space surrounding them, and accompanying words have some serious typos. 

As you could guess at this point, there's a good story of persistence and triumph to be told here. "The Stith Brothers" doesn't really tell it fully. A good short biography written by a professional is in order here. Buying the book is merely a nice gesture toward a pioneer of the game who deserves better. 

Two stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)

Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.

Review: The American Game (2025)

By S.L. Price

I was first introduced to the game of indoor lacrosse in 2008, when I was assigned to cover the Buffalo Bandits for my newspaper. I had seen some games over the years, but I can't say I knew much about the sport and its history. I didn't even know that Canada played box lacrosse (same game, different name) over the summer. It seems that arena operators needed something to keep their buildings busy over the summer when hockey was out of session, and lacrosse was one of their solutions.

What I obviously needed at the time was a book that covered the history of the sport, with all of its particularities and quirks. "The American Game" now has come along to fill that gap - a little late for my purposes, but not for others. 

The book by S.L. Price is something of a big sandwich with many ingredients, with the world lacrosse championships (if you hear or read lacrosse by itself without a qualifier, the reference is usually to the outdoor game) in 2018 and 2023 serving as the start and finish. They become the launching point for discussion about this sport's history. More than any other recreational activity, lacrosse has an extremely complicated history and evolution. 

Is it our oldest game? Well, it's in the neighborhood. The Native population has been playing a form of it since the 12th century. That baseball and football newcomers in the neighborhood. The origin game had a spiritual aspect to it, and involved hundreds of people playing over vast stretches of land. Not only did it offer some pleasure, but it helped train people for warfare. French missionaries arrived in the 1600s and named the game lacrosse because of the shape of the sticks - which were always wooden and thus connected the player to nature. Organized versions of the game began with a club in Montreal in 1856. Once that happened, it was easier to make the game "portable" and demonstrate it to others. 

A funny thing happened along the way in terms of the game's popularity. It caught on at elite colleges in the Northeast part of the United States first. The Ivy League was partly responsible for that, but other top universities in that region were involved as well. So we had the odd combination of the sport being played by relatively uneducated Natives (discrimination and obstacles have been part of their lives throughout our history) and rich white young males. That's created a tension that exists to this day. The sport has done well in the Baltimore area and Long Island; it's interesting that the indoor game as a viable commercial entity has failed in both places over the years.

There are all sorts of issues that have come up over the years as lacrosse officials have tried to grow the game throughout the continent and the world, and Price gives them a long look. The Native population is very proud about its role in inventing the game, but has had to battle to earn respect for that fact for many years. In recent years, the aboriginal population has tried to field a "national" team made up of people on both sides of the United States-Canada border. That's very different than any other model for the creation of a team, and it keeps hitting road blocks. For example, the Haudenosaunee team (it went back to its original name from the adopted Iroquois) has tried to use its own passports to attend international events, which proved difficult in some cases. You'll be hearing a great deal about that as we close in on the 2028 Olympics, which will host lacrosse once again.

Growth of the game shouldn't be restricted to white males, of course. African-Americans have been on the fringes of the sport for years. That's in spite of the fact that Jim Brown - still considered one of the greatest lacrosse players ever even though he's better known for football - was a heck of a role model in his play. Imagine taking one of the greatest physical specimens in sports history, putting him a contact sport, and giving him a stick. As the author points out, Brown was also ambidextrous in his shooting, so it's really tough to believe anyone could even slow him down on the field. But Blacks have been a small minority, and sensitivity is not a word traditionally associated with lacrosse players. 

Then there's the matter of women, who are trying to find their way into the sport in increasing numbers. Even various tribes are split on that issue, as it goes against some ancient teachings. It really took Title IX to jump-start lacrosse in this country, and it has made some progress. We'll have to see how far it can move forward to becoming nationally popular, but there are already signs that its growth might represent a change of direction for attitudes within and outside of the sport.

The lacrosse culture also comes up here as well. Two famous incidents are covered here: the murder by a University of Virginia player of his ex-girlfriend, and a rape charge involving the Duke team that was later shown to be false. Surveys of college athletes in recent years have shown very high use of drugs and alcohol by participants. Officials have tried to change that, and the numbers are down a little. But that's allowed lacrosse to drop just below hockey around the top of the lists, rather than having a clear lead. 

On a personal level, I was a little disappointed that indoor lacrosse wasn't covered better along the way. My bias as a Buffalo-based writer comes through, since the Bandits of the NLL average around 18,000 per game. But some top players do play inside and outside. The Thompson family, which grew up near Syracuse, gets plenty of attention here. They have been around the NLL for years, and two of the brothers wore Buffalo Bandits uniforms. Other players with connections to Buffalo pop up here, including Tehoka Nanticoke, Josh Byrne, Dhane Smith and Brett Bucktooth. 

Price obviously put in many, many hours to write "The American Game." He talked to a great many people and learned about others, and it's certainly a comprehensive cultural history of the sport. That was the goal, I assume, and it was a success. The thought did come to mind than there's almost too much of a good thing here, as it checks in at 560 pages (although more than 100 of those are notes and sources). The story line jumps around a little bit along the way. Maybe a little more editing was in order, and obviously this big of a book on lacrosse isn't exactly designed for a mass audience. However, those with an interest in the subject will find the book well-done and comprehensive.

Four stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.)

Be notified of new posts on this site via X.com @WDX2BB.  

Review: Baseball Prospectus 2025

Edited by Patrick Dubuque, Bryan Grosnick and Ginny Searle. 

Baseball Prospectus 2025 starts out in an interesting way as it launches a 30th edition. The original founders of the book got together to tell the book's origin story. It explains that after the strike of 1994-95, there seemed to be a hole in the niche of books on baseball statistical analysis. Bill James had moved on to other things from his annual Baseball Abstract, and the Elias annuals had just ended in 1994. So a few guys got together and essentially started to put some ideas down on the paper. 

The result was the Baseball Prospectus 1996, with all of 250 copies printed. I suppose one pops up on eBay every so often, but you probably couldn't afford to buy one now. Yes, it was amateurish in some ways - someone forgot to include the chapter on the St. Louis Cardinals. But there is a quote in that first book that set the tone for the 29 volumes that came next: "Since we like to laugh as much as you do, we've tried to be entertaining as well as informative, but if you think we're just one or the other, we'll take it." James' secret weapon in his Abstracts was that he was such a good writer - and didn't take any prisoners because he didn't need day-to-day access to baseball people because he wasn't a journalist covering the sport. That approach has been a hallmark of Baseball Prospectus over the years - it was often quite funny. 

The book is now the biggest part of something of a baseball empire, including a website and some other publications. But this is clearly the flagship of the enterprise. It plops on the doorstep around the start of spring training, promising plenty of insights within lots and lots of pages.

Where are we in year 30? It's striking just how much more information is out there these days, and a lot of it pops along the way. Someone seems to be counting everything that happens in a baseball game, from what pitch is thrown to how fast it is to where it arrives around home plate to how hard it is hit to where it lands. And there are a lot of games, so that's a lot of data that is kept somewhere. Baseball Prospectus has a lot of smart guys looking at the data as they search for connections and conclusions.

The publication adds some new tools this year in the form of metrics like StuffPro and PitchPro. I'm not going to tell you I read much of it, or that I even understood it. But it's nice to know the brainy types are still poking around in all sorts of different areas. 

In going through this book, it seems as if the player descriptions often lean heavily on the site of data analysis and new statistics to come to conclusions. I found myself a little lost with some of the numbers, and that's speaking as someone who called himself a one-man analytics staff with his slow-pitch softball team in the 1980s and 1990s. (I'm confident we were the only team in the Malone's bar league to keep track of Runs Created.) 

In other words, the book is still informative, but perhaps not quite as entertaining as it used to be. That varies from team to team and writer to writer, but to be fair it's difficult to be funny in print. Maybe I skim the player summaries a little more than I used to do in the old days. On the other hand, the team essays usually offer some original thoughts and different perspectives, and they remain smart and fun. Some other articles on baseball are worthwhile as well.

This book usually finds its biggest audience with fantasy players, which is fine. I'm probably not as enthusiastic about the book as those in that particular group, but I still buy it every year and look forward to its arrival. "Baseball Prospectus 2025" will be in a convenient place for the rest of the baseball season, coming out of there's a trade of interest or if I just want background information when a game pops up on television. There's something comforting about that.

Four stars

Learn more about this book from Amazon.com. (As an Amazon affiliate, I earn money from qualified purchases.) 

Be notified of new posts on this site on X.com via @WDX2BB.