Purchase
The Epic Adventure that Took Baseball Around the Globe - And Made It America's Game
PublicAffairs
April 2006
368 pages
ISBN: 1586483110
Hardcover
Add to Wish List
Non-Fiction | Historical | Non-Fiction Biography
In October of 1888, Albert Goodwill Spalding -- baseball
star, sporting-goods magnate, promotional genius, serial
fabulist - departed Chicago on a trip that would take him
and twenty of the game's greatest players on a journey
around the globe. Their mission: to bring baseball, and with
it the American way, to the four corners of the earth.
Spalding hoped this international adventure would fix the
game of baseball in the American consciousness as the purest
expression of the national spirit, and at the same time seed
the world's markets for his nascent sporting-goods empire.
To boost interest, he brought along an ill-fated "aerialist"
who would leap from a hot-air balloon before each game (he
wore a parachute, though it didn't always work); a young
African-American minstrel; and stars such as New York Giants
shortstop John Ward -- a notorious playboy and graduate of
Columbia Law School who was simultaneously divorcing his
starlet wife and plotting the overthrow of Spalding's
National League. In the course of their
thirty-thousand mile journey, Spalding and this motley group
of cultural ambassadors played before kings and queens,
visited the Coliseum and the Eiffel Tower, and took pot
shots with their baseballs at the great Sphinx in Egypt.
Upon their triumphant return, they were greeted as heroes by
the likes of Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, and Benjamin
Harrison. Getting themselves into scrapes and narrowly
escaping international incident all around the globe, these
innocents abroad gave the world an early peek at the
American century just around the corner. Chronicled
with dash and wit, Spalding's World Tour is an
irresistible adventure and an unflinching portrait of one of
the most colorful figures in the history of American sports.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy