Here are a couple good reads from Sports on Earth.
Chuck Culpepper has a fun piece about bowling and the Bowlers Journal, which turns 100 this week.
LAS VEGAS — Quick, name the country’s oldest sports monthly.
Four… three… two… one…
That would be Bowlers Journal, which will turn 100 on Friday, which will be “Bowlers Journal Day” in Illinois by legislative proclamation. So happy Bowlers Journal Day, while acknowledging that Bowlers Journal’s longevity does tell us something essential about ourselves: we humans love to drive ourselves half-mad with games.
The knack for driving ourselves half-mad went on fine display Sunday at the South Point Hotel Casino. The half-madness visited even the best. “I think at the high level, the bowlers are better than they’ve ever been; these guys are just phenomenal,” said Bowlers Journal president Keith Hamilton, yet the half-madness bit almost the whole lot of them.
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Meanwhile, Dave Kindred recalls the first African-American to play in the SEC.
Live long enough, you have a story. That’s why (Nate) Northington came to Oxford. He told his story as part of a university-sponsored event known as Racial Reconciliation Week. Nate Northington’s story neither begins nor ends with Greg Page, but it cannot be told without him.
Northington was the first African-American to play in a Southeastern Conference athletic contest. All-State out of Louisville’s Thomas Jefferson High School, he was recruited for the University of Kentucky by the school president, by the state’s governor and, almost incidentally, by the school’s football coach, a Bear Bryant disciple named Charlie Bradshaw.
Northington then was 6 feet and 175 pounds. He had what coaches call “sudden speed;” here this instant, gone the next. After Northington signed with Kentucky, so did Page. He, too, was an All-Stater and African-American. He was a man among children, 6-2, 220, quick and strong, a defensive end from the mountains of eastern Kentucky. For a year, Northington and Page were roommates. They made unlikely partners, Northington so quiet as to be invisible, Page so boisterous he seemed to be everywhere.
They had in common a mission: They would be the SEC’s first black athletes. That became clear to Northington during a dinner at the governor’s mansion in the winter of 1965. He heard Gov. Ned Breathitt’s recruiting pitch and came away thinking: “Integrating the athletic programs in the SEC would remove one of the last vestiges of segregation in the South and move the country forward.” The governor pulled a scholarship offer sheet from his coat pocket. Northington signed it.