"Glory Days" by L. Jon Werthem

Hey there, sports fans, have I got a book for you!

"Glory Days, The Summer of 1984 and the 90 Days That Changed Sports and Culture Forever."

Yeah the title is ponderous, and perhaps a bit overblown, but it is still terrific book.  L. Jon Werthem is a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, and he examines a specific point in time, in this case, the Summer of 1984, and crafts a book that makes the case that events in that period "changed sports and culture forever."

Did they?  Maybe, maybe not, but Werthem details a whole bunch of stuff from that period that, if you were around then, stirs up a lot of fun and provocative memories.  Here are some of them.....

• David Stern had just become Commissioner of the NBA.  At the time, the league was clear fourth in popularity among the four major North American sports leagues, and was only a few years removed from having its Championship series telecast on tape delay.  Stern would change that.
•  Part of that change was ignited by an epic seven game Finals series between the Lakers (Kareem, Magic) and Celtics (Bird).
• The 1984 Olympic Games were staged in Los Angeles
• The US Olympic basketball team was led by a young guy who was about to leave the University of North Carolina a year early and enter the NBA Draft.   While he certainly wasn't unknown at the time, Michael Jordan used that Olympics stage to truly announce himself to the world.  Certainly, personal brand marketing in the world of sports would never be the same again.
• ESPN, a fledgling money losing all sports cable network was purchased by ABC, thus assuring its survival.
• An obscure US Supreme Court ruling that went against the NCAA was about to bring about a huge change in college sports, changes that are still being felt in 2021.
• The Michael Jackson "Victory Tour" took place and a cause-and-effect line between that Tour and the New England Patriots dynasty that would dominate the first two decades of the 21st century can be drawn.
• A bombastic young New York City real estate developer bought into the United States Football League.  Through hubris, lies, betrayals of his fellow owners, and sheer narcissism, that guy managed to put the  USFL out of business, but it sure ensured his brand recognition.  That owner?  Donald J. Trump. 
• Vince McMahon Jr. consolidated the provincial fiefdoms of professional wrestling, and planted the roots of what would become a billion dollar empire, the WWE.  He did so in large part with some assistance from a crazily coiffed and dressed female pop singer and another fledging cable television network, MTV.
• Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer, and all Olympians in Los Angeles were given a password that they could use to communicate "electronic messages" among each other throughout the Olympic Village.  The numbers show that fewer than twenty percent of them availed themselves of this pioneering technology.
• These were the Olympics that were boycotted by the USSR and a whole bunch of Soviet satellite nations.  I knew that, but I did not know about an attempt by the USSR to undermine the Games by sending racially tinged (to put it mildly) letters to the Olympic Committees of many African nations in an effort to have those nations boycott the Games in America as well.  Yes, it was a Russian hack.  By 2020, the Russians got a bit more sophisticated in their methods of trying to undermine American institutions.

Where Werthem reaches a bit is when he tries to bring other areas of pop culture into his narrative.   The details of the Jackson Victory Tour can be related to sports, but "The Karate Kid?"  Maybe not so much.  That aside, I highly recommend this book to the sports fans among you.  I gobbled it down in two days.

Three and One-Half Stars from The Grandstander.