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We buckle up this week for a wild and revelatory ride across 50+ years of big-time soccer in the United States with one of the biggest unsung heroes of the American game - and unquestionably, one of its most prominent "keepers of the flame." The professional and personal life journey of "Soccer Tom" Mulroy ("90 Minutes with the King: How Soccer Saved My Life") virtually parallels the 1970s-to-1990s boom-bust-and-boom-again roller coaster of soccer's early modern history in the US - and today thrives in tandem with the sport's long-overdue cultural acceptance. In a pro career spanning five leagues and nearly a dozen franchises (including Good Seats bucket-list stops with the MISL Hartford Hellions, ASL Cleveland Cobras, NASL Miami Toros & 1986-87 AISA champion Louisville Thunder) Mulroy's on-field exploits mirrored the chaotic nature of a game still struggling to find its footing among North America's competitive sports landscape. After his playing days, Mulroy evolved into the sport's indefatigable

We turn back the clock 48 years ago this week for a revisit of one of the most consequential contests in the history of the National Hockey League - with sports historian Ed Gruver ("The Game That Saved the NHL: The Broad Street Bullies. the Soviet Red Machine, and Super Series '76"). The dust jacket of Gruver's new book sums it up thusly: "In late 1975 and early 1976, at the height of the Cold War, two of the Soviet Union’s long-dominant national hockey teams traveled to North America to play an eight-game series against the best teams in the National Hockey League. The culmination of the “Super Series” was reigning Soviet League champion HC CSKA Moscow’s face-off against the defending NHL champion Flyers in Philadelphia on January 11, 1976. Known as the “Red Army Club,” HC CSKA hadn’t lost a game in the series. Known as the “Broad Street Bullies,” the Flyers were determined to bring the Red Army team’s winning streak to an end with their trademark aggressive style of play. "Based largely on interviews,

It's the adventure-filled story of how a late-60s-era Scottish top-league footballer helped start the first-ever professional soccer circuit in the then-British colony of Hong Kong - punctuated by an unexpected off-season loan to one of the most forgotten franchises in North American Soccer League history. Derek Currie ("When 'Jesus' Came to Hong Kong: The Remarkable Story of the First European Football Star in Asia") joins us live and direct from his home in Bangkok,Thailand for an anecdote-rich romp through the international pro soccer scene of the 1970s/early 1980s - including his memorable Texas summer of 1976 wearing the "Stars and Stripes" for the NASL's oft-overlooked San Antonio Thunder!   + + +    SPONSOR THANKS: Old School Shirts (promo code: GOODSEATS):  https://oldschoolshirts.com/goodseats   BUY/READ EARLY & OFTEN: When 'Jesus' Came to Hong Kong: The Remarkable Story of the First European Football Star in Asia (2023): https://amzn.to/3H0snJm   FIND & FOLLOW: Website

We press the rewind button on a most interesting 2023, and peer ahead into the uncharted waters of 2024 with our fourth-annual(-ish) Holiday Roundtable Spectacular - featuring three of our favorite fellow defunct sports enthusiasts: Andy Crossley (Fun While It Lasted & Episode 2); Paul Reeths (StatsCrew.com, OurSportsCentral.com & Episode 46); and Steve Holroyd (Crossecheck, Philly Classics & Episodes 92, 109, 149, 188 & 248). Takes of varying temperatures fly as we review some of the most inspiring and curious events of the past year, debate who and what might be next to wobble into obscurity, and conjecture about future scenarios for the next generation of defunct and otherwise forgotten pro sports teams and leagues - including: USFL 2.0 + XFL 3.0 = TBD 2024 Oakland A's to Las Vegas (maybe) Major League Cricket MiLB ownership consolidation The Savannah Bananas Premier Lacrosse League: from tour to teams Professional Box Lacrosse Association (RIP) Women's pro volleyball MLS vs. US Socce

After last week's ugly, team-record 63-21 drubbing by the Las Vegas Raiders, and the subsequent dismissal of its head coach and general manager - it's been a (yet another) rough season for the NFL's Los Angeles Chargers.  While family owner/scion Dean Spanos tries (again) to plot a plan forward, we look nostalgically back to the franchise's early years in San Diego as one of the charter entries in the iconoclastic American Football League - an era that produced the club's (still) one-and-only championship in 1963. AFL history chronicler Dave Steidel ("The Uncrowned Champs: How the 1963 San Diego Chargers Would Have Won the Super Bowl") helps us zero in on the story behind that AFL title-winning season - with an in-depth revisit of iconic coach Sid Gilman's blockbuster squad, featuring revered Charger greats like Tobin Rote, John Hadl, Paul Lowe, Keith Lincoln, Chuck Allen, and future Pro Football Hall of Famers Lance Allworth and Ron Mix.  Plus: we debate whether the '63 Chargers could have truly beaten the

We adjust our TV antenna rabbit ears back to the late 1970s for the origin story of one of the most influential firms in modern-day sports media - with Rick and Dee Ray, the founders of televised college sports juggernaut Raycom Sports. In their new George Hirthler-penned memoir "Unstoppable: A Story of Love, Faith and the Power Couple Who Ignited the College Sports Broadcasting Boom," the Rays rewind the videotape to a time when a new technology called "cable" was still in its infancy, and the American television landscape was largely defined by a web of powerful broadcast network-affiliated stations - save for a handful of scrappy alternative "independent" signals in each market. While pro sports filled plenty of prime/weekend network TV windows, and individual teams provided a steady slate of in-season games to local indie station audiences - regularly scheduled D-I college sports was virtually non-existent outside of limited national broadcasts featuring only big-name schools.  It was against this backdr

The 1960s were a tumultuous, but crucial period in the development of professional soccer in the United States and Canada - with teams from Scotland, of all places, playing a particularly interesting role. The dividing line for the modern North American pro game, of course, was the breakthrough, near-live (two-hour-delayed) NBC-TV network telecast of the 1966 World Cup final between eventual champion England and West Germany - the first-ever national standalone broadcast of the sport. Prior to that watershed, it was sports entrepreneur Bill Cox's International Soccer League that imported full major European & South American teams to play in a senior-level competition in largely East Coast urban centers and first-generation immigrant communities. Among the ISL's regulars were three Scottish sides - including Kilmarnock FC, which played four seasons and made the 1960 final. Immediately after the World Cup, no fewer than three groups of eager sports owners sought to launch a full-fledged domestic North Amer

[By popular demand, an archive re-release of Episode 321 guest and "The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America" author Michael MacCambridge - from his first appearance on the show from March 2017!] Sports author/historian Michael MacCambridge ("Lamar Hunt: A Life in Sports") joins Tim Hanlon to discuss the legacy of Lamar Hunt – the most unlikely of sports executive pioneers – and the outsized role he played in modernizing 1960s pro football into the enduring American sports juggernaut it is today.  MacCambridge recounts how a strong rebuff from the stodgy 1950s NFL establishment galvanized Hunt’s determination to disrupt the football status quo, how the AFL’s “Foolish Club” of owners persevered through staggering financial losses, how Kansas City mayor Harold Roe “Chief” Bartle wooed Hunt and his flailing Dallas Texans franchise to the City of Fountains, and the karmic irony of the AFL Chiefs’ victory over Max Winter’s NFL Minnesota Vikings in the final AFL-NFL Super Bowl (IV) in 1970. + + + 

11-year pro football offensive lineman and budding Renaissance man Steve Wright ("Aggressively Human: Discovering Humanity in the NFL, Reality TV, and Life") helps us check off a few new boxes in our obsessive quest for forgotten sports franchise completism. Before his post-career exploits as the 10th-place finisher in the 22nd season of the CBS reality competition series "Survivor" ("Survivor: Redemption Island"), and as the inventor of pioneering sideline cooling-mist tech firms Cloudburst and Mist & Cool, Wright blocked and tackled for some of the game's most exciting teams during the 80s and early 90s - including the Dallas Cowboys, the Baltimore and Indianapolis versions of the Colts, the Los Angeles incarnation of the Raiders, and the 1985 USFL Championship Game finalist Oakland Invaders. + + +    SPONSOR THANKS: DraftKings Sportsbook (promo code: GOODSEATS): https://myaccount.draftkings.com/login      BUY/READ EARLY & OFTEN: "Aggressively Human: Discovering Humanity in the NFL, Reality

Veteran Tennis.com writer, Racquet Magazine columnist & "Three - A Tennis Show" podcast host Joel Drucker ("Jimmy Connors Saved My Life") stops by to drop some serious knowledge on how the decade of the 1970s transformed the sport of professional tennis into the global juggernaut it is today - including pivotal turning points such as: The groundbreaking World Championship Tennis (WCT) and Virginia Slims Circuit tours that brought standardized scheduling, big-time media exposure and unprecedented prize money to both the men's and women's pro games for the first time' 1973's paradigm-shifting intergender "Battle of the Sexes" competition between inveterate hustler Bobby Riggs and female icon Billie Jean King - an international spectacle whose result both transcended tennis and changed the face of American sports; and World Team Tennis - the innovative, ahead-of-its-time rethink of how the pro game could be played - featuring city-domiciled, co-ed, team-oriented match play on colorful playing surfaces in f

Football biographer Mike Richman ("George Allen: A Football Life") joins us for a decades-long journey back into the old-school NFL (and USFL) exploits of one of pro football's most intense and enigmatic sideline characters. From the dust-jacket of "A Football Life": "George Allen was a fascinating and eccentric figure in the world of football coaching. His remarkable career spanned six decades, from the late 1940s until his sudden death in 1990 at the age of seventy-three. Although he never won a Super Bowl, he never had a losing season as an NFL head coach and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2002. "In 'George Allen: A Football Life', Mike Richman captures the life and accomplishments of one of the most successful NFL coaches of all time and one of the greatest innovators in the game. A player’s coach, Allen was a tremendous motivator and game strategist, as well as a defensive mastermind, and is credited with making special teams a critical focus in an era in which they were an aftert

It's an episode that's hopefully as "Good! Like Nedicks!" - as we take a biographical look back at the rich and influential life of pioneering New York City sports broadcaster Marty Glickman - with biographer/Yeshiva University history professor Jeffrey Gurock ("Marty Glickman: The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend"). From the "Marty Glickman" dustjacket: "For close to half a century after World War II, Marty Glickman was the voice of New York sports. His distinctive style of broadcasting, on television and especially on the radio, garnered for him legions of fans who would not miss his play-by-play accounts. From the 1940s through the 1990s, he was as iconic a sports figure in town as the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle, the Knicks’ Walt Frazier, or the Jets’ Joe Namath. His vocabulary and method of broadcasting left an indelible mark on the industry, and many of today’s most famous sportscasters were Glickman disciples. To this very day, many fans who grew up listening to his coverage of Knicks basketball a

Veteran New York-based sports writer/public relations pro Charles Cuttone has seen just about everything in his nearly 50 years of promoting professional sports across the Gotham sports scene - dating all the way back to 1974 as a fresh-faced elementary school intern with the World Football League's ill-fated New York Stars. While the WFL gig (and team, for that matter) didn't last long, it was his next experience that following spring - with a rag-tag but ambitious pro soccer outfit called the New York Cosmos - that both solidified a budding career interest in sports PR, and yielded a ring-side seat to one of the most indelible stories in 1970s sports history. In his new book "Pelé, His North American Years: A Tribute" - visually co-created with the exquisite imagery of legendary sports photographer George Tiedemann - Cuttone recounts the three-season, two-and-a-half-year phenomenon known as Pelé - and how the world's then-greatest player (and arguably, most famous athlete) transformed not only a earnest cl

After an absence of over six years and more than 300+ episodes, sportswriter extraordinaire Michael MacCambridge ("Lamar Hunt: A Life in Sports"; "America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation"; "Chuck Noll: His Life's Work") makes his triumphant return to the podcast - this time to celebrate the release of his brand new, instant sports history classic, "The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America." It's just about everything you'd expect from the author of what is arguably the most definitive look yet at the decade that undeniably shaped the modern trajectory of sports in America - including (of course) a bevy of challenger leagues, defunct teams, one-of-a-kind events that only the Seventies could produce!   + + +   SPONSOR THANKS: Old School Shirts (promo code: GOODSEATS):  oldschoolshirts.com/goodseats   BUY/READ EARLY & OFTEN: The Big Time: How the 1970s Transformed Sports in America (2023): https://amzn.to/3LYAQ2H   FIND & FOLLOW: Website:

Veteran Fox Sports and MSG Networks play-by-play man Kenny Albert ("A Mic for All Seasons") joins host Tim Hanlon for a cornucopia of career memories from his 30+ year journey in sports broadcasting – including, of course, obligatory stops along the way for various "forgotten" teams, events and even TV networks of yore. Now celebrating his third decade with Fox, the Emmy Award-winning Albert has regularly called Sunday games for every season of the network's NFL coverage - as well as for its telecasts of Major League Baseball, college football, thoroughbred horse racing, boxing, and (between 1995-99) NHL hockey. Simultaneously, the versatile Albert has been a fixture in New York local sports broadcasting as a regular TV and radio voice for the NHL Rangers and the NBA Knicks for MSG Networks - and is the lead play-by-play hockey announcer for TNT's national NHL broadcast package. If that weren't enough, Albert has been a regular broadcast presence for NBC's network coverage of the Winter (since 2002) and Summ

We explore the traumatic events of Major League Baseball's notorious 1994-95 players' strike - with Chico State history professor Bob Cottrell ("The Year Without a World Series: Major League Baseball and the Road to the 1994 Players' Strike"). More than 900 regular season games, the entirety of the playoffs, and, for the first time in 90 years, the sport's signature World Series - were all lost to the work stoppage, which began on August 12, 1994.   The strike ended late into the 1995 preseason, when then-US District Court judge Sonia Sotomayor granted an injunction sought by the players' association to prevent club owners from using replacement players.  The ruling forced both sides to come to an agreement, and regular-season play resumed with a delayed and truncated 144-game schedule at the end of April. (Ironically, MLB umpires decided to go on strike just as the two sides settled their dispute, so the 1995 season opened with regular players - but replacement umpires!) Among the strike's biggest victims

We head "True North" to the Canadian province of Manitoba this week in search of heretofore undiscovered historical nuggets from the WHA and original NHL versions of hockey's Winnipeg Jets - with veteran journalist/author Geoff Kirbyson. Kirbyson's accounts of the Jets' early years in the revolutionary World Hockey Association from 1972-79 ("The Hot Line: How the Legendary Trio of Hull, Hedberg and Nilsson Transformed Hockey and Led the Winnipeg Jets to Greatness"), and the club's original 17 seasons in the National Hockey League from 1979-96 ("Broken Ribs and Popcorn: How the Winnipeg Jets became the best team in the NHL's most offensive era to not win the Stanley Cup"), are must-reads for fans of either incarnation of the original team - and even for curious Arizona Coyotes or current-generation Jets (née Atlanta Thrashers) followers befuddled by the NHL's "official" history.    + + +   SPONSOR THANKS: DraftKings Sportsbook (promo code: GOODSEATS): https://myaccount.draftkings.com/login      BUY/RE

[A scheduling snafu this week gives us a perfect excuse to re-release this hidden gem from November 2019 - enjoy!] You can be forgiven if you never heard of the International Volleyball Association – the mid-1970s co-ed pro circuit that aimed to draft off the rising popularity of Olympic and beach volleyball during America’s wildest sports decade – but the high-wattage media and entertainment moguls behind its creation at the time certainly cannot. The IVA was the brainchild of prolific Hollywood television and film producer David Wolper ("Roots," "The Thorn Birds" and "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" to name a mere few) – who became smitten with the sport while filming documentary footage of the 1972 Olympics in Munich. Wolper quickly recruited a who’s who of well-connected LA-based investors – including ABC-TV (later Paramount and Fox) chief Barry Diller, as well as Motown music studio founder/movie producer aspirant Berry Gordy – and by 1975, a five-team California and Southwest-centric league bow

The National Football League is back in full swing, and what better way to celebrate than with a deep dig into the primordial ooze from which it and the broader endeavor of professional football evolved - with Gregg Ficery, author of the new and immediately essential tome "Gridiron Legacy: Pro Football's Missing Origin Story." From the revelatory new book's dust jacket:   Professional football's backstory was lost, until now. In the beginning, in 1892, pro football was born. Then it effectively died in infamy in 1906. It was resurrected nearly a decade later and soon became the American Professional Football Association in 1920 (renamed the National Football League in 1922). Few are even familiar with the basics of the historical narrative: the star players, the rivalries, and the game's brutality. After its infancy in Pennsylvania, fanatic passion and media hype started exploding around the country for the greatest teams ever assembled in what became known as the Ohio League. More suddenly, the league died

Hollywood history maven Erin Carlson ("No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of "A League of Their Own": Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood") stops by the podcast to help celebrate the 30th anniversary of the iconic motion picture that comically (and lovingly) brought the largely forgotten story of the World War II-era All-American Girls Professional Baseball League to the big screen - simultaneously preserving and making history in the process.       + + +   SPONSOR THANKS: DraftKings Sportsbook (promo code: GOODSEATS): https://myaccount.draftkings.com/login      BUY/READ EARLY & OFTEN: No Crying in Baseball: The Inside Story of "A League of Their Own": Big Stars, Dugout Drama, and a Home Run for Hollywood  (2023): https://amzn.to/3EmwvSL     FIND & FOLLOW: Website: https://goodseatsstillavailable.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/GoodSeatsStill Instagram (+ Threads): https://www.instagram.com/goodseatsstillavailable/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GoodSea