Images of Sports

For seven decades, the Boston Garden functioned as both a de facto community center and the indoor entertainment hub of New England.

Known to millions as the home of the Bruins and Celtics, the Garden was also home to a variety of other events. The Boston Garden was truly a ""people's palace,"" serving as a venue for events both grand and humble, monumental and mundane. It was nothing less than the city's playpen, music hall, political clubhouse, tavern, cathedral, and living room. The Boston Garden opened on November 17, 1928, to an overflow audience who witnessed local boxer Dick ""Honeyboy"" Finnegan defeat reigning world featherweight champion Andre Routis in a non-title bout. Three days later, the Bruins greeted a crowd that fire department officials estimated was nearly four thousand above maximum capacity. The Boston Garden captures these moments and the unique relationship that was forged with the city right from the beginning. During the Great Depression, the Garden hosted countless community events, such as free public skating and religious services. It was Boston's main attraction with concerts, wrestling, school sports, and the ever popular Bruins. Later years saw the birth of the Boston Celtics in 1946 and their unsurpassed record of sixteen world championships. Following World War II and through the baby boomer years, performers as diverse as Liberace, Elvis, and the Rolling Stones also packed fans in. The Boston Garden was demolished in 1998 to make room for the Central Artery and private development, but it lives on in the hearts of New Englanders.

On March 13, 1953, the Boston Braves left their hometown after playing 76 seasons of baseball in Boston. They ended up in Atlanta via Milwaukee, but their rich history was already made in New England, where they captured ten pennants and one world championship. The 1914 World Series, a four-game sweep of the Philadelphia Athletics, was considered by the Associated Press to be the greatest sports upset of the first half of the twentieth century. In Images of Sports: The Boston Braves, author Richard Johnson tells the story of this beloved team. Thirty-eight Boston Braves represent the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, including players as famous as Rabbit Maranville and Babe Ruth and as colorful as Kid Nichols and Warren Spahn. The Braves left more than just a baseball legacy in Boston. In 1947, Braves' management founded the Jimmy Fund, now an internationally known organization, to raise funds for cancer research and treatment at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. In 1950, outfielder Sam Jethroe made history as Boston's first African-American major leaguer.

The Boston Bruins are America's oldest and most honored NHL franchise. Although they tasted success early on, the arrival of Bobby Orr in 1966 seemed like divine intervention. Over the past half-century, the Bruins have missed the playoffs only twelve times and have captured two Stanley Cups (1970 and 1972). When their twenty-nine-year streak of consecutive playoff appearances ended in 1997, it marked the conclusion of the longest such streak in North American professional sports history. From Shore to Orr to O'Reilly to Bourque to Thornton, the Bruins' style of play has been two-thirds ballet and one-third street fight. The Bruins in Black and White: 1966 to the 21st Century, the second book in this two-volume illustrated history, celebrates the storied success of this legendary team.

In the beginning, the Boston Bruins were a rough tribe of Canadian tradesmen seeking their fortune with the first American team in the fledgling National Hockey League. When the Bruins played their first game in 1924, hockey was already a staple of the Boston sports scene. It was the prospect of attracting the capacity crowds that supported Boston's local club and college teams that lured Charles F. Adams to invest in the franchise. The Bruins were both an outgrowth of local tradition and a manifestation of the ambitions of the NHL. Their roster has included the likes of Eddie Shore, "Dit" Clapper, and the greatest player of all time, Bobby Orr. The photographs in The Bruins in Black and White: 1924-1966, the first of a two-volume illustrated history, document the success of Charles F. Adams's investment and the achievements of players who proudly wore the Bruins colors. Their passion, commitment, and love of the game are evident on every page.

Since opening on July 10, 1935, Suffolk Downs has played host to some of Thoroughbred racing's greatest champions, including Triple Crown winners War Admiral, Whirlaway, and Assault, as well as other greats such as Seabiscuit, John Henry, and Cigar. In addition to these legendary horses, hall of fame jockeys George Woolf, Johnny Longden, Eddie Arcaro, Chris McCarron, Angel Cordero, and Jerry Bailey have all competed at the East Boston oval. The signature race at Suffolk Downs, the Massachusetts Handicap, maintains a prominent date on the Boston sports
calendar. The list of heralded visitors to Suffolk Downs is in no way limited to the racing world. Entertainer Bing Crosby and television star Rin Tin Tin have made appearances, and the Beatles performed their final Boston show at Suffolk Downs in 1966. Through nearly two hundred images, Suffolk Downs revisits these monumental racehorses, personalities, and events.

Since 1897, Patriots Day in Massachusetts has been celebrated with the running of the world's most-honored road race, the Boston Marathon®. The hilly course challenges runners with well-known landmarks such as "Heartbreak Hill" and the deceptively inviting downhill treks at both the start and finish of the 26.2-mile journey. The Boston Marathon captures the colorful spirit of America's greatest race through more than 200 photographs.

Boston University has been synonymous with college hockey excellence for more than eighty years. Since taking the ice for the first time in 1918, the Terriers have fashioned a storied history that has consistently placed the program among the nation's elite.

Boston University Hockey chronicles the many National Collegiate Athletic Association Eastern Collegiate Athletic Conference, Hockey East, and Beanpot championship team moments; the myriad accomplishments of individual players and coaches, such as Rick Meagher, the "BU Four," Jack Kelley, and Jack Parker; and the overall legacy of achievement by the long line of skaters who have donned the scarlet-and-white sweaters. The illustrations in Boston University Hockey (including many that have never been published elsewhere) offer a compelling view of a team that has won more national titles than any other eastern college hockey school.

Springfield has a dynamic hockey history that dates back 80 years, beginning with the Springfield Indians. One of the first professional hockey teams in the United States, the Indians were an inaugural member of the Canadian-American Hockey League. The Indians helped form the American Hockey League, where Springfield won seven Calder Cups, including a record three in a row from 1960 through 1962. Major-league hockey followed in the mid-1970s, when the New England Whalers came to town. Today, the Springfield Falcons carry on the city's great hockey legacy. Several hall of famers have skated for Springfield-based teams over the years, including Gordie Howe, Brian Kilrea, Chuck Rayner, Earl Seibert, Eddie Shore, Billy Smith, and Lorne "Gump" Worsley. Hockey in Springfield is the story of the teams, players, and coaches who make up one of the richest hockey traditions in all of North America.

Boston's Boxing Heritage: Prizefighting from 1882 to 1955 chronicles the rich history of prizefighting in Boston and the many characters that made the Hub city the home of champions. It is not only a pictorial history of the sport but also a tale of heroes and villains, gangsters and mobsters, contenders and bums, trainers and newspapermen, straight men and cheats. It is a saga of ethnicity and race, of color barriers broken and neighborhood rivalries settled and rekindled. At its core this story is truly about a city and its relationship with a sport.

Boston's Boxing Heritage: Prizefighting from 1882 to 1955 covers the early bareknuckle years of boxing through the sport's post-World War II boom. When Boston's John L. Sullivan won the heavyweight crown from Paddy Ryan in 1882, he took prizefighting from an illegal, red-light district pastime to the country's most popular sport and in essence put Bean Town on the sporting map. For the next sixty years, Boston remained one of the elite cities in the boxing world spawning ring immortals such as George "Little Chocolate" Dixon, Joe "the Barbados Demon" Wolcott, William "Honey" Mellody, Rocky Marciano, Jack "the Boston Gob" Sharkey, and Sam "the Boston Tar Baby" Langford.

In 1910, the Boston Sunday Herald reported that skiers were swarming over the Newtons, Middlesex Falls, and Blue Hills. The Berkshires provided splendid terrain, and the skiing was inexpensive. This visual history traces how skiing progressed from the pre-tow era of outings on wooded trails and golf courses to the mechanization of the sport. After World War II came massive building, with sophisticated lifts, snowmaking, and all the modern requirements that have kept Massachusetts one of America's winter ski states.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst boasts over a century of both intercollegiate and intramural athletics. The story begins with the early recreational activities of a New England agricultural college and ends with a highly competitive Division I athletic schedule. From playing ice hockey on the campus pond in 1908 or dribbling basketballs in the Curry Hicks cage in 1931 to the construction of the state-of-the-art Mullins Center in 1993, the University of Massachusetts Amherst has produced some of the best athletes in American sports history. These stars include hockey great Jerry McCarthy, a 1924 Olympic silver medalist; softball pitcher Danielle Henderson, a 2000 Olympic gold medalist; and Julius Erving, legendary NBA star.

The storied history of Harvard University football can be traced back to the very roots of the collegiate game in America. Harvard's athletic contest with McGill University in 1874 marked the inception of the modern game for the Crimson. The club from Cambridge then went on to become one of the dominant football programs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, winning seven national championships between 1890 and 1919, culminating with its Rose Bowl victory over Oregon in January 1920. Since 1956, the team has been a
perennial contender in the Ivy League. Images of Sports: Harvard Football captures all the drama and excitement of the pioneering football program's legacy. Included are the exploits of Charlie Brickley in the 1910s and Barry Wood in the 1930s; the school's first Ivy League title in 1961 and the 29-29 "victory" over Yale in the most famous of all one hundred eighteen riveting match-ups. The captivating images included in Harvard Football detail these accounts up to the Crimson's 2001 run to perfection, a 9-0-0 record, marking the first undefeated, untied season in eighty-eight years.