Need a last-minute Father's Day gift? These 3 sports books could do the trick
Kenny Albert before a Rangers playoff game in 2017. Credit: Getty Images/Bruce Bennett
Sports books are a Father’s Day gift staple, especially when, well, let’s just say time is running out before the big event on Sunday.
If you are so inclined, here are three from the sports media and business genre to consider.
“A MIC FOR ALL SEASONS: My Three Decades Announcing the NFL, NHL, NBA, MLB, and Olympics,” by Kenny Albert
Kenny Albert, who grew up in Port Washington, has gone from a boy wonder of sorts in sports broadcasting to a 56-year-old who has seen and done it all.
In this good-natured, lighthearted memoir – a tone befitting the man himself – Albert recounts it all by telling stories that touch on many of the biggest names in sports and sports media over the past half-century.
That includes, yes, his famous father, Marv, and uncles Steve and Al, who helped point him in the direction his professional life took.
But his Zelig-like journey found its own often-circuitous path, on which he encountered an array of characters.
When the Islanders hired Barry Trotz as coach in 2018, fresh off him winning the Stanley Cup with the Capitals, naturally it turned out he and Albert had been road roommates in the early 1990s when both were with the AHL’s Baltimore Skipjacks.
That story is in the book, as are many others.
In Appendix II, Albert lists all the analysts and sideline reporters with whom he has worked with. There are more than 225 of them – and counting.
“Gut Punch,” by Bob Gutkowski with Wallace Matthews
Bob Gutkowski, who grew up in Uniondale, was the famously dapper president of Madison Square Garden Network and later Madison Square Garden itself during a pivotal period in the late 1980s and early '90s.
That included the spring of 1994, when the Rangers won the Stanley Cup and the Knicks reached the NBA Finals, a period often cited this year as both teams made runs that petered out earlier than those of 30 years ago.
Gutkowski’s MSG run ended shortly after the 1994 teams’ did, but he was there long enough to gain firsthand insights into fractures in the GM / coach relationships between the Rangers’ Neil Smith and Mike Keenan and Knicks’ Dave Checketts and Pat Riley.
On the business side, Gutkowski was on the front lines of the Yankees’ move to MSG and later the historic launch of their own YES Network. Those deals led to a relationship with George Steinbrenner that was . . . complicated.
“976-1313: How Sports Phone Launched Careers and Broke New Ground,” by Scott Orgera and Howie Karpin
People younger than 40 or so often are amazed and amused that there used to be a business built on paying to call a phone number to get the latest scores.
It’s true. It was called “Sports Phone,” and its seven-digit number, “976-1313,” is forever burned into the brains of every middle-aged New York-area sports fan (and sports bettor).
But the service’s legacy has extended deep into the 21st century in the form of the many prominent sportscasters who got valuable experience there, including the likes of Howie Rose, Gary Cohen, Linda Cohn, Bob Papa, Don La Greca and more.
Scott Orgera and Howie Karpin tell the history of the station’s rise and fall but focus even more on the personalities and stories that came out of that era.
Sports talk radio and later the internet made “Sports Phone” obsolete by the late 1990s, but its heyday was a memorable journey.
Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.
