The New York Clipper Annual

For more than a century the American farm, factory and frontier provided opportunities for physical workers to display their skill, win a bet, brag or perhaps just have some fun. Competitions that emphasized useful skills, like plowing, corn-husking, rock drilling, typesetting, and tree cutting, were common in the antebellum and post-Civil War periods, often drawing large crowds and the attention of sporting journals. For many years conventional American sports occurred in the workplace. This may help explain why the nicknames of so many prominent collegiate or professional sporting teams--Cornhuskers, Lumberjacks, Miners, Cowboys, Packers and Boilermakers--are also the occupations of 19th century worker-athletes. By examining the American experience with competitions among workers, this book provides a new understanding of the interrelated nature of occupation and leisure.

Helms Hall of Fame's brothers William M. and Andrew B. "June" Rankin lived exciting lives covering sports for papers like the New York Sunday Mercury, New York Herald, New York World, Brooklyn Daily Eagle and New York Clipper from 1870 to 1930. Playing for amateur and semiprofessional Rockland County (N.Y.) clubs in the mid-1860s through early 1870s, the brothers developed into baseball writers and editors. Often working with Henry Chadwick, called the Father of Baseball, the brothers became authorities on the sport, writing histories of clubs and players, and scoring for the early New York and Brooklyn clubs. June went on to cover boxing as it transitioned into a gentlemen's sport, football as it emerged on college campuses, and golf through the formative years of the USGA and PGA. He also wrote two baseball books. Filled with sporting details, this book sets the brothers into a period of great changes in the world of American sports.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.