Ted Strong Jr.
The Untold Story of an Original Harlem Globetrotter and Negro Leagues All-Star
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- 44,99 €
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- 44,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Ted Strong Jr. (1917-1978) was a two-sport athlete, a major star of the Negro Leagues and one of the original Harlem Globetrotters. His prominence in the Negro Leagues led Branch Rickey and other white baseball league owners to consider Strong as one of several possible players to integrate major league baseball, and he was a key force on the basketball court when the Globetrotters defeated the then-invincible Minneapolis Lakers in 1948. Despite his athletic dominance in the 1930s and 40s, Strong Jr. has largely been forgotten in American sports history.
In Ted Strong Jr.: The Untold Story of an Original Harlem Globetrotter and Negro Leagues All-Star, Sherman L. Jenkins finally shares the fascinating story of this star athlete. Born Theodore Relighn Strong Jr. in South Bend, Indiana, Strong Jr., the eldest of fourteen children, was fortunate to have a positive influence in his father—a baseball player himself. Strong Jr. went on to play in seven Negro League Baseball East-West All-Star games, receiving the most votes in all of Black baseball history in 1939, and was a key member of the 1940 Harlem Globetrotter basketball team that won the World Professional Basketball Championship. Jenkins details all of this and more, including Strong Jr.’s frustrations with integration efforts promised by white baseball team owners and the eventual decline of the Negro Leagues after the entrance of Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball.
Through hours of interviews with Strong Jr.’s father and with friends and teammates of his brother Othello, along with extensive research of newspaper archives, this book provides rich insights into an unsung hero in the American sports landscape. For baseball and basketball fans of all ages, Ted Strong Jr.’s biography displays for the first time the determination and guts of a man who was idealized by many African Americans in the early twentieth century.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jenkins, president of a digital media company, provides an accessible telling of the fascinating life of Ted Strong Jr., who in the 1930s played with the Kansas City Monarchs in baseball's Negro Leagues and then with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team of the 1940s. His father also played in the Negro Leagues, as did one of his younger brothers. The narrative focuses on the physical attributes that allowed Strong to dominate and touches on the obstacles that kept him from greater heights, including not being selected to join his contemporaries Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Buck O'Neil in integrating major-league baseball. Strong joined the Globetrotters in its infancy and helped create the showmanship known as "shadow-ball" that carries on today. Jenkins gives a wide-angle view instead of using a microscopic lens; he does little to highlight Strong's unsettled personal life or his extraordinary numbers or achievements. Most of the story comes from interviews with members of Strong's family, providing a solid look at a pioneering black athlete.