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Longtime sports/information technology entrepreneur/executive Dave Lockton joins this week to discuss his managerial adventures in the geographically fragmented and provincially fractious auto racing scene of the late 1960s/early 1970s – including the founding of the groundbreaking Ontario Motor Speedway, and its role in the ideation of the ultimate "all-star" professional driving competition – the International Race of Champions (IROC).

Sports fans of a certain age will surely remember the old IROC series – which ran for 30 seasons starting in 1973 – where the best drivers from the world's top auto racing disciplines raced one another in equally prepared and equitably crewed cars to determine motorsports' "ultimate" annual champion. Multi-circuit veteran Tony Stewart (who won the final IROC XXX in 2006) certainly does – he and fellow NASCAR Hall of Famer Ray Evernham are teaming to reinvent the format next summer with a nationally televised six-race, short-track series to air in prime time on CBS called the Superstar Racing Experience (SRX).

The basis for the IROC concept dates back to Lockton's time as President/CEO and chief visionary of Ontario's "Indianapolis of the West" – a stalled mid-1960s pipe dream that Lockton helped resuscitate, leveraging his budding professional driver representation firm and his Indianapolis Speedway/USAC governing body relationships into a state-of-the-art, all-purpose West Coast racing mecca just east of Los Angeles.

Among the innovations Lockton and team pioneered at Ontario (which included a private stadium club with annual memberships, corporate suites, crash-absorbent retaining walls & safety fences, and computerized real-time timing/scoring/positioning data) was a first-of-its-kind pro-am celebrity race – featuring a co-mingling of Hollywood luminaries and professional drivers competing in similarly prepared vehicles – the foundational element of what would soon become the signature IROC series.

PLUS: Hugh Downs keeps it together; Evel Knievel makes his case; and the short-lived sports commissioner career of Gerald Ford!

We point our GPS coordinates this week to the endearingly enigmatic city of New Orleans, for an overdue look into the Big Easy's chaotic pro sports franchise history – with Historic New Orleans Collection writer (and recovering sports scribe) Nick Weldon ("A Streetcar Named Basketball").

Although a mainstay of baseball's minor and Negro leagues since the dawn of the sport's professional era in the late 1800s (including Louis Armstrong's well-outfitted, attention-grabbing, but largely lamentable 1931 barnstorming "Secret Nine" club), Louisiana's largest city has been considered more of a football town over the last half-century – especially after the arrival of the NFL Saints in 1967.

But it's the pursuit (and occasional success) of pro basketball that has captured the fancy of local sports entrepreneurs most in the intervening decades – providing the Crescent City with some of its most fascinating, yet oft-forgotten sporting exploits:

• The American Basketball Association's Buccaneers (1967-70) – a charter member, who came within one game of winning the league's first-ever title, before moving to Memphis two seasons later;
• The National Basketball Association's Jazz (1974-79) – an expansion franchise known mostly for the dazzling on-court wizardry of local LSU hero "Pistol" Pete Maravich, and not much else;
• The Women's Professional Basketball League's Pride (1979-81) – ready-made to take advantage of the region's strong female collegiate roots and presumptive US women's success at the (eventually boycotted) 1980 Olympics; AND
• The arrival of the NBA's Hornets (now Pelicans) in 2002 – finally cementing the long-term viability of pro basketball in New Orleans.

Weldon helps us dig in to all of these points on NOLA's pro hoops history curve – but also some tantalizing tangents like the one-year incarnation of the USFL's New Orleans Breakers, and even the "Sun Belt" Nets of the original mid-1970s World Team Tennis.

Pittsburgh-based The Athletic sportswriter Stephen J. Nesbitt ("How the Pipers, Condors and Pro Basketball in Pittsburgh Went Extinct") joins to help us dig into the surprisingly rich (though mostly woeful) history of professional hoops in the Steel City.

Though the game has long thrived at the collegiate level (Pitt's Panthers began playing in 1905; the Duquesne Dukes in 1914), the city's record of success at the pro level has been distinctly more fleeting. In fact, some would argue it was never better than the pre-integration Black Fives era of the 1910s/20s, when eventual Naismith Hall of Famer Cumberland Posey led his Monticello (1912) and Loendi Big Five (1919-23) clubs to five "Colored" Basketball World Championships.

As professional (and eventually integrated) leagues took root in the decades that followed, Pittsburgh's attractive demographic profile made it a natural choice for inaugural – yet ultimately short-lived – franchises in virtually every major hardwood circuit that came calling, including:

• The never-playoff-qualifying Pirates (1937-39) and re-born Raiders (1944-45) of the NBA-precedent National Basketball League;
• The lamentable Ironmen (1947-48) of the NBA tributary Basketball Association of America;
• The Connie Hawkins-led Renaissance ("Rens") of the one-and-a-half-season (1961-62) American Basketball League; and especially;
• The head-scratching Pipers of the legendary American Basketball Association – who, despite winning the league's first championship behind regular-season and playoff MVP Hawkins in 1968 – relocated to Minneapolis, moved back to Pittsburgh, and finally re-branded as the "Condors" for two forgettable last seasons (1970-72).

With a checkered pro history like that, it's little wonder that the basketball team most memorably associated with the City of Bridges wasn't even a real club – the Pittsburgh Pisces (née Pythons) of the 1979 sports/disco fantasy cult film classic The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.

When the original version of the modern-era Washington Senators announced its intention to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul in 1960 to become the Twins the following season, Major League Baseball moved up part of its planned 1962 expansion by a year to help stave off dual competitive threats of both a new challenger Continental League and the potential loss of its longstanding federal antitrust exemption.

To placate regulators, the American League reworked its plans and replaced the departing DC franchise with an entirely new expansion club – to also be known as the Senators – to commence immediately in its wake for 1961. After an "inaugural" season at old Griffith Stadium, the new Senators moved to the new District of Columbia Stadium under a 10-year lease.

For most of their second incarnation, the "new" Senators were just as woeful as their predecessors, losing an average of 90 games a season and perennially finishing below .500 – helping preserve the traditional lamentation to which DC area fans had become accustomed: "Washington: First in War, First in Peace and Still Last in the American League."

But in 1969, when new owner Bob Short successfully coaxed Hall of Fame batting legend Ted Williams out of retirement to become the club's rookie manager, things immediately changed. Williams' maniacal approach to hitting helped ignite the moribund Senators to its one and only winning season during its 11-year run – winning 86 games (21 more than in 1968) – and vaulting from last in the previous year's ten-team American League to just one game out of third in the new divisional AL East.

Attendance at the newly renamed RFK Stadium zoomed above 900,000 for the season (not to mention a Senators-hosted MLB All-Star Game featuring a booming 2nd inning HR by hometown hero Frank Howard), and Williams was voted AL Manager of the Year. For the first time in decades, it seemed baseball in Washington was "back."

But, as 1969 Senators chronicler Steve Walker ("A Whole New Ballgame: The 1969 Washington Senators") tells us, the excitement was not to last; the club soon reverted back to its forlorn ways – exacerbated by an increasingly impatient and already-conspiring Short – who relocated the franchise to the Dallas Metroplex after the 1971 season, to become today's Texas Rangers.

It would be 33 years until another major league team would call DC home again.

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

We take a rare dip into the minors this week with the intriguing story of hockey's Columbus Chill – the 1990s sensation that took the East Coast Hockey League and the Ohio capital's sports scene by storm, and helped set the table for Columbus's ascension into top-tier "major league" status by the dawn of the 2000s.

Historically overshadowed by the scale, prowess and outsized culture of its hometown Ohio State University Buckeyes athletics programs, Columbus' pro sports landscape in 1991 largely consisted of AAA baseball's sleepily long-standing Yankees affiliate Clippers – and not much else. Professional hockey, specifically, had been absent from the market for 14 years, after a largely lamentable run of thinly supported International Hockey League franchises (Checkers, Golden Seals, Owls) during the late 60s and 1970s.

But though cheeky marketing campaigns and promotion-laden game-day experiences – targeted at both the growing city's young professional set and fun-seeking OSU students looking for off-campus entertainment alternatives – the Chill quickly made an impact and suddenly becoming the hottest ticket in town. Sellouts in the ancient 5,600-seat Ohio State Fairgrounds Expo Coliseum (opened in 1918) became the norm, and national media lauded the club as the vanguard of minor league sports.

After a dubious scheduling snafu by Fairgrounds management amidst the Chill's second season, fans and local community leaders galvanized around a longer-term plan to solidify the newly popular team's future and independence – leading to the eventual commitment to construct a top-flight downtown (now, Nationwide) arena – and, ultimately, the awarding of an expansion NHL franchise in 1999.

Ex-Chill President David Paitson and former Columbus Dispatch sportswriter Craig Merz (Chill Factor: How a Minor-League Hockey Team Changed a City Forever) recount the story of the team that paved the way for the Columbus Blue Jackets – and beyond.

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

Negro League ace historian/author Jim Overmyer (Queen of the Negro Leagues: Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles; Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City) returns for a deep dive into the extraordinary dual-sport career of Negro League baseball AND Black Fives-era basketball legend Cumberland Posey – including the two dominating teams he founded, owned, managed, and played for – baseball's Homestead Grays and basketball's Loendi Big Five.

Considered the best African-American hoops player of his time (although not inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame until 2016), Posey was a standout collegiate player at Pitt, Penn State and Duquense before launching his semi-pro Loendi club in 1915 – which he built and led to four consecutive Colored Basketball World's Championships from 1919-1923.

Posey was already moonlighting as a player with Negro League baseball's Grays starting in 1911, becoming the team's manager in 1916, and finally its owner by the early 1920s – ultimately building one of the powerhouses of black baseball. Posey's Homestead franchise won eleven pennants across three leagues – including nine consecutive Negro National League titles from 1937-45 – and three Negro World Series Championships (against counterparts from the Negro American League) in '43, '44 & '48.

Overmyer discusses his new book (Cum Posey of the Homestead Grays: A Biography of the Negro Leagues Owner and Hall of Famer), Posey's prodigious talents both as a player and owner (which garnered him posthumous induction in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006), and the Grays' twin homes of both suburban Pittsburgh and Washington, DC.

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

While we ruminate on what a potential resumption of the National Hockey League's delayed 2020 regular season (and playoffs) might look like in the months ahead, we pause to look back at the rich, but altogether confounding history of the world's premier pro hockey circuit with Down Goes Brown blog scribe and Athletic columnist Sean McIndoe (The Down Goes Brown History of the NHL: The World's Most Beautiful Sport, the World's Most Ridiculous League).

Over its often-illogical 103-year history, the NHL has proven to be – as the dust jacket to McIndoe's loving, but irreverent book intimates – a league that often can't seem to get out of its own way:

"No matter how long you've been a hockey fan, you know that sinking feeling that maybe – just maybe – some of the people in charge here don't actually know what they're doing. And at some point, you've probably wondered – has it always been this way? The short answer is yes. As for the longer answer, well, that's this book."

McIndoe helps us cheat-sheet through some of the league's defining historical inflection points, including:

• The myth of the "Original Six" – the hallowed group of supposedly foundational franchises cemented during WWII-era 1942 – that conveniently ignores 15 teams that preceded them in the league's first 25 years of existence;
• 1967's "Great Expansion" – when the NHL doubled its franchise count from six to twelve, including pre-emptive strikes against the Western Hockey League with new teams in Los Angeles (Kings) and Oakland (Seals);
• The 1979 "merger" with the pesky World Hockey Association – which absorbed only four of the challenger's seven remaining clubs; AND
• Comical expansion/relocation follies in Cleveland, Kansas City, Denver, and Atlanta (twice).

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

The Major Indoor Soccer League's rocket red ball bounces back our way this week for an Eighties-style rewind into the story of the Los Angeles Lazers – as seen through the eyes of one of its chief front office architects, Ronnie Weinstein.

Claimed from dormancy (as the previous Philadelphia Fever) by LA sports baron Dr. Jerry Buss – owner of the 1980 NBA champion Lakers, NHL Kings, 1981 TeamTennis champion Strings, and the building that housed them, Inglewood's "Fabulous" Forum – the Lazers began life in the MISL in the fall of 1982 under the direction of Weinstein and Buss' eldest son Johnny.

True to its name (and emblematic of the league's over-the-top promotional zeitgeist), the team immediately became known for its cutting-edge pre-game laser light shows, which management felt ideally suited to the lightning-fast pace of indoor soccer – and hoped would help the Lazers stand out from the wealth of entertainment options available in Southern California.

Weinstein, Buss & Co. also tapped heavily into the celebrity-driven energy associated with their "Showtime"-era Laker arena mates, borrowing the Paula Abdul-choreographed Laker Girls to become the "Lazer Girls" for their games – and regularly recruiting Hollywood A-listers like James Caan, Neil Diamond, Cher, Ricky Schroeder, and elder Buss poker mate Gabe Kaplan to the festivities.

But the white-hot Lakers, the rising Kings, a robust concert schedule, and the family-favorite Strings all took scheduling precedence over the Lazers, leaving only a hodgepodge of mostly weekday winter school nights from which to attract soccer-mad families to the Forum.

Of course, there was high-scoring MISL soccer action – but the Lazers were not very good (an 8-40 inaugural record and just one winning [1987-88] season over the team's run didn't help) – and the majority of games were not well-attended (the league's least-drawing franchise in five of its seven seasons).

Despite all the synergies – including Jerry Buss' strong enthusiasm for the game itself – nothing seemed to work. By 1987 (with son Jim now helming the team alongside Weinstein), Buss saw the Lazers and the league as doomed – unless moves to reduce player salaries and shift play to a more family-friendly summer schedule were embraced.

After fruitless pleading with the MISL Board of Governors, Buss pulled the plug on the team after the 1988-89 season, telling Weinstein if he ever wanted to pursue another indoor soccer endeavor with his more prudent business model, he'd be there to back it.

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

It's our deepest dive yet into the legendarily one-of-a-kind All-American Girls Professional Baseball League with Marshall University Professor of Women's Sport History Kat Williams (The All-American Girls After the AAGPBL: How Playing Pro Ball Shaped Their Lives).

Widely acknowledged as the forerunner of women's professional league sports in the United States, the pioneering AAGPBL featured more than 600 female players over the course of its twelve seasons between 1943-54 – spanning 15 mid-sized markets across the American Midwest, and drawing sizable crowds – including nearly a million fans at its peak in 1948.

In its first season, the league played a game that resembled more softball than baseball: the ball was regulation softball size (12 inches) and the pitcher's mound was only 40 feet from home plate – a third closer than that of men's baseball. Pitchers threw underhand windmill (as in softball) and the distance between bases was 65 feet – a full 25 feet shorter than in the men's game.

But, over the AAGPBL's history, the rules gradually evolved to approach those of full-fledged men's baseball; by the league's final season in 1954: the ball was regulation baseball size, the mound distance was 60 feet (a mere six inches closer than the men's game), and the basepaths were 85 feet long (just five feet shy of those of the men).

To prove its competitive seriousness, the league peppered its on-field managerial ranks with male skippers of substantial major league baseball pedigrees – including eventual National Baseball Hall of Famers Max Carey and Jimmy Foxx.

The quality of play was consistently high, convincing even the most purist of traditional baseball fans that "the Girls could play." By 1947, the AAGBPL was even emulating the majors in identifying and recruiting talent from the fertile playing fields of baseball-mad Cuba – a story Williams helps illustrate with her new profile (Isabel "Lefty" Alvarez: The Improbable Life of a Cuban American Baseball Star) of one of the handful of émigrés who ultimately came to the US to become "All-American."

This week's episode is sponsored by the Red Lightning Books imprint of Indiana University Press – who offer our listeners a FREE CHAPTER of pioneering sportswriter Diana K. Shah's new memoir A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps!

The curious story of baseball's Atlantic City (NJ) Bacharach Giants originates from a unique intersection of racism, tourism, and politics.

In 1915, an independent semi-pro "Atlantic City Colored League" was formed to provide an entertainment outlet for the city's 11,000+ black residents – with the hope being they would attend the games and stay off the boardwalk, a then-booming summer haven for white tourists.

Two black businessmen active in the local Republican political machine asked an existing area team to join the league and promotionally rename itself after politician Harry Bacharach, the once-and-future mayor of Atlantic City. When the team refused, the duo travelled south and convinced eight members of the Duval Giants, a black amateur team in Jacksonville, Florida, to venture north and create the foundation for a new independent club instead.

The "Bacharach Giants" largely dominated whatever opponents came their way during the late 1910s, despite persistent financial wobbliness. In 1920, the team began a three-year stint as an associate member of Rube Foster's new Negro National League (NNL) – allowing them to retain official independence, but also to coordinate non-league games with the teams from Foster's largely Midwest-based circuit.

In 1923, Atlantic City broke from the NNL to help start the rival Eastern Colored League (ECL), where they achieved their greatest success – including winning two league pennants in 1926 and 1927 – though losing both times in subsequent Negro League World Series play to the NNL's Chicago American Giants.

Beset by rancorous squabbles over player contracts, the ECL folded in 1928. Five of its clubs – including the Bacharach Giants – formed the bulk of a new American Negro League for 1929, only to see both the league and its team from Atlantic City fold by the end of the season.

Author/historian Jim Overmyer (Black Ball and the Boardwalk: The Bacharach Giants of Atlantic City) joins to discuss the history of the club, and some of the legends that emanated from it, including Negro League standouts Dick Lundy, Oliver Marcell, Dick Redding, "Nip" Winters, Chanel White, "Rats" Henderson, Claude Grier, and Luther Farrell – and National Baseball Hall of Famer John Henry "Pop" Lloyd.