Pre-release offer from Wil Haygood
You can order a copy of Wil Haygood’s new book, signed on a bookplate and shipped upon release. Fulfillment is from M. Revak & Co. Booksellers, with consideration from APB, a global speaker, celebrity, and entertainment agency.
Tigerland: 1968-1969: A City Divided, a Nation Torn Apart, and a Magical Season of Healing
by Wil Haygood
Publication date: September 18, 2018
From the author of the best-selling The Butler–an emotional, inspiring story of two teams from a poor, black, segregated high school in Ohio, who, in the midst of the racial turbulence of 1968/1969, win the Ohio state baseball and basketball championships in the same year.
1968 and 1969: Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated. Race relations are frayed like never before. Cities are aflame as demonstrations and riots proliferate. But in Columbus, Ohio, the Tigers of segregated East High School win the baseball and basketball championships, defeating bigger, richer, whiter teams across the state. Now, Wil Haygood gives us a spirited and stirring account of this improbable triumph and takes us deep into the personal lives of these local heroes: Robert Wright, power forward, whose father was a murderer; Kenny Mizelle, the Tigers’ second baseman, who grew up under the false impression that his father had died; Eddie “Rat” Ratleff, the star of both teams, who would play for the 1972 U.S. Olympic basketball team.
We meet Jack Gibbs, the first black principal at East High; Bob Hart, the white basketball coach, determined to fight against the injustices he saw inflicting his team; the hometown fans who followed the Tigers to stadiums across the state. And, just as important, Haygood puts the Tigers’ story in the context of the racially charged late 1960s. The result is both an inspiring sports story and a singularly illuminating social history.
Click here to pre-order your signed copy!
“During the 1968-1969 school year, an all-black high school soared to win Ohio’s basketball and baseball championships. Journalist Haygood (Media, Journalism, and Film/Miami Univ.; The Haygoods of Columbus: A Love Story, 2016, etc.), a Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, tells a story of perseverance, courage, and breathtaking talent as he recounts, in vibrant detail, the achievements of the Tigers, a basketball and baseball team at Columbus, Ohio’s inner-city East High School. Drawing on interviews with the athletes and their families, coaches, and teachers as well as published and archival sources, the author creates moving portraits of the teenagers and their undaunted coaches and supporters.
‘Black boys in a white world,’ the students lived on the blighted side of town and had always attended underfunded schools; many had mothers who cleaned houses for wealthy whites. But they were uniquely, impressively talented athletes, and sports was a means of proving their worth. The Tigers could not have achieved their success without the help of two dedicated coaches: Bob Hart and Paul Pennell, both white, ‘big-hearted men who had a social conscience’; nor without the tireless and defiant efforts of Jack Gibbs, Columbus’ first black high school principal, an astute networker who roused support from parents, business owners, and community leaders. Because the East Side had the city’s highest crime rate, Gibbs made sure the students were kept too busy with school activities to get into mischief. East High ‘became part progressive laboratory, part military school, a place that had high expectations for student achievement.’
Haygood dramatically renders the heady excitement of each game, the tense moments of a close contest, and the exuberant—tear-jerking—wins. The inspiring story of East High’s championship becomes even more astonishing in the context of endemic racism, which the author closely examines, and ‘the turmoil of a nation at war and in the midst of unrest,’ roiled by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. An engrossing tale of one shining moment in dark times.”
-Kirkus Reviews
“The city is Columbus, Ohio; its Tigers are the phenomenally talented and determined basketball and baseball teams at East High School, and the ‘magic’ happens during the traumatic and tragic events of 1968 and 1969. In spite of official desegregation, East High’s students were all African American, and its resources severely limited; yet it was rich in talent and spirit, from exceptionally gifted athletes to the heroically devoted and innovative principal, Jack Gibbs, also African American. Columbus is the hometown of journalist, Guggenheim fellow, and acclaimed author Haygood (Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, 2015), and he is in the zone as he portrays in striking and thoughtful detail team members, many the sons of domestic workers, and their coaches and supporters in this dynamic, multidimensional, and heart-revving inquiry into how two ragtag teams managed to win back-to-back state championships in basketball, displaying passionate teamwork that embodied the pride and protest of the black-power movement. As in all his avidly read books, Haygood set the stories of fascinating individuals within the context of freshly reclaimed and vigorously recounted African American history as he masterfully brings a high school and its community to life. This laugh-and-cry tale of rollicking and wrenching drama set to the beat of thumping basketballs and the crack of baseball bats, fast breaks and chearleaders’ chants, is electric with tension and conviction and incandescent with unity and hope.”
-Donna Seaman
WIL HAYGOOD is currently a Visiting Distinguished Professor in the department of media, journalism, and film at Miami University, Ohio. For nearly three decades he was a journalist, serving as a national and foreign correspondent at The Boston Globe, where he was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and then at The Washington Post. He is the author of The Butler: A Witness to History; Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America; Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson; In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr; Two on the River; King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and The Haygoods of Columbus: A Family Memoir. The Butler was later adapted into the critically acclaimed film directed by Lee Daniels, starring Forest Whitaker and Oprah Winfrey. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and the 2017 Patrick Henry Fellowship Literary Award for his research on Tigerland. He lives in Washington, D.C.
If you are interested in having Wil Haygood speak at your next event, please contact APB at apb@apbpeakers.com or call 617-614-1600.
Click here to pre-order your signed copy!
Genres:
- History
- Sports
- American History
- African-American History
- Non-fiction
- Basketball
- Baseball
ISBN: 978-1524731861
Publication date: September 18, 2018