While the amount of reading I have done lately for reviews has slowed some due to professional and school obligations, the time I have found to read for review lately has been well-used as there are some excellent sports books coming out this season. This is one, about Atlanta's entry into the world of professional sports a few decades ago and it was a very good read. Here is my review of "Loserville."
Title/Author: “Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade
Atlanta – and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports” by Clayton Trutor
Rating: 4 ½ of 5 stars (excellent)
Review:
For a time during the 1960's and 1970's, the sports world
had a nickname for the city of Atlanta – "Loserville." It was derived mainly from the lack of
on-field success for three of the city's four major sports teams – baseball's
Braves, football's Falcons and basketball's Hawks. The only team during that time was the newest
franchise, the Atlanta Flames hockey team.
They also were the only team of the four who drew consistently large
crowds but even they, by the end of the 1970's, also had troubles in the
standings and in the stands. How these
franchises coped with these times and how it shaped the city is illustrated in
this very good book by Clayton Trutor.
There is a lot of information and ideas to digest in this
volume. There are the business aspects behind
the operations of each of the teams as Atlanta had no major league teams before
1966 when the Milwaukee Braves, after a contentious sale and lame duck season
in Milwaukee, moved to the southern city.
Soon afterward, the NFL awarded the city an expansion franchise, hoping
the fans who flocked to college football games would do the same for a
professional team. Basketball also took
a wayward team, the St. Louis Hawks, and moved them to Atlanta. The Flames came
later when the NHL awarded two expansion teams to Atlanta and Long Island in
1972.
Trutor addresses both the economic and the social impacts
that the new teams brought to the city. There were new facilities that needed
to be built – Atlanta Stadium for the Braves and Falcons in an area that had a
poor reputation for crime and safety, not completely unfounded. There was also a question of removing
families, mostly Black from homes to make way for the ballpark. Later the Omni,
an arena that was built in a business district hoping the fans of the Flames
and the Hawks would revitalize the area, also had issues. These were mainly due to flaws in the
building structure, rendering it obsolete soon after opening. There were other issues such as
transportation and racial matters as well with mostly well-to-do white patrons
attending the games. This makes for an
excellent look at what professional sports can and can't bring to a city,
something noteworthy as more team owners look for publicly financed facilities.
The reading is easier than expected, staying away from a scholarly
type of organization and language. The
only quibble is that the ending feels rushed when other southern cites are
illustrated to show that it wasn't only Atlanta that had issues with new
professional teams. It was ironic to
read a book titled "Loserville" immediately after the Braves won the
World Series and Tampa was a city cited at the end, despite the fact that two
of its teams, the football Buccaneers and hockey Lightning, both are the
reigning champions of their respective leagues.
Still, if one enjoys reading about the business side of sports mixed in
with social issues, this is an excellent choice.
I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing
a copy of the book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
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