Jeffrey A. Kroessler's comprehensive and entertaining time line stretches from the pastoral entertainments of the Dutch to the corporate captivity of professional sports. He chronicles events ranging from the truly heroic to the heartbreaking, from moments of municipal greatness to inescapable social change. Through it all he plants the world of sport at the very center of New York's story. Fully illustrated, The Greater New York Sports Chronology covers the spectacle of blood sports like bullbaiting to the birth of baseball, the now-forgotten six-day pedestrian contests, and today's New York City Marathon. Alongside great moments like the Mets' "amazin'" World Series win in 1969, Joe Louis's historic bouts with Max Schmeling, Jackie Robinson's breaking of baseball's color line, and Secretariat's remarkable Triple Crown win at Belmont, we encounter the point-shaving scandals of college basketball and the corrupting influence of organized crime in professional boxing. Beyond immortals like Lou Gehrig and Joe Namath, we also find such once well known figures as Joe Lapchick, Marty Glickman, Gertrude Ederle, and Toots Shor. Year by year, this chronology recounts chess matches, America's Cup races, dog shows, golf tournaments, polo matches, tennis games, and more. Kroessler describes the historic venues, boxing arenas, gyms, stadiums, ballparks, and racetracks that have come and gone, yet made New York the undisputed capital of American sport. Witnessing it all, of course, are the greatest fans in the world.

Reprinted New York Times articles (created from 35mm microfilm).

To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.

Two top authorities slug it out over the fifty hottest debates in New York sports New Yorkers are notoriously opinionated, and nothing spurs their argumentative side quite like sports. David Lennon of Newsday and Roger Rubin of The New York Daily News—two New York sportswriters, add gasoline to the fire with The Great New York Sports Debate, a raucous and spirited examination of the fifty most contentious issues in New York athletics. Longtime friends and rivals, Lennon and Rubin engage in heated debate on a wide range of topics, including: • Is George Steinbrenner good or evil? • Which athlete is the biggest villain in New York? • New York’s greatest quarterback: Namath or Simms? • Can a New Yorker like “both teams”? Touching on every aspect of New York sports—including baseball, basketball, boxing, and the New York Marathon—The Great New York Sports Debate is guaranteed to spark lively discussion among sports fans everywhere.

Can you guess the most memorable sports moments to happen in the Big Apple? Collected together for the first time, The 20 Greatest Moments in New York Sports History chronicles the most memorable sporting events to be held in New York, ranking them based on importance and effect on the sport (and city). Broken down into four parts, each event will include the storyline that led up to the moment, original materials from the media coverage of the event, a column from a local journalist to lend perspective, and finally first-person accounts from the men and women that made these moments happen. Veteran journalists Todd Ehrlich and Gary Myers dive deep into each of these moments, sharing why they are so special and the reason we still talk about them today. Including original interviews and information previously unreleased, The 20 Greatest Moments in New York Sports History is not only for the New York sports fan, but anyone who appreciates the amazing effect that baseball, basketball, football, hockey, tennis, golf, boxing, and numerous other sports can have on our cities and country as a whole. So...which event will be at the top? Roger Maris breaking The Babe's Home Run record? Willis Reed hobbling onto the count before game seven against the Lakers in the 1970 NBA Finals? David Tyree's "Helmet Catch" in Super Bowl XLII? Mark Messier's guarantee before the 1994 Stanley Cup? Tiger Woods dominating on Bethpage's "Black Course" to win the 2002 US Open? Or perhaps the bout at Madison Square Garden between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier? There's only one way to find out!