Loserville, by Clayton Trutor, is about the history of Atlanta’s relationship with major league sports. The book covers from the 1950s, when ownership groups first tried to lure major league baseball and football teams to the city, through the 1966-1971 years, when the city acquired a major league team in each of the four major US sports, becoming the first city in the South to do so, to the 1990s, when the city broke its decades-long losing streaks in multiple sports and became a winner, finally attracting the fans to the city’s teams that had previously been so elusive. Along the way, it discusses all sorts of related topics–race relations in Atlanta, urban development, mass transit, and general social trends.
The title of the book comes from the headline of a 1975 article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that wrote about how the success predicted for Atlanta’s major league teams when it acquired them had failed to materialize. Both in terms of play, as Atlanta teams generally had losing seasons–the Atlanta Falcons in the 1960s and 1970s being a particularly acute example of futility–as well as attendance, as following short bursts of enthusiasm after each team moved to Atlanta, fan attendance dropped off rapidly. Not surprisingly, owners that had expected prosperous investments also suffered, their anticipated cash cows becoming instead drags on their business empires.
The book makes clear that it wasn’t the apathy of Atlanta’s citizens–nor racism, as is often alleged–that explains the poor attendance. One problem, as the book describes, was that Atlanta already had a highly active sports scene prior to the major league teams arriving. College football was the king of sports in Atlanta, with the nationally competitive UGA Bulldogs and the Georgia Tech Yellowjackets commanding large loyal followings, both teams boasting season-long sellout games every fall. The Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, attracted tens of thousands of golf fans every spring, and numerous smaller tournaments in the region were also well-attended. Although not much respected on the sports pages, both NASCAR and professional wrestling also had large fanbases in the Atlanta region. As one local put it, once the major league teams arrived in Atlanta, “All of a sudden, we had too much on our plates.” And it was the newcomers who had to prove themselves, not the long-established sports.
Then, too, the MLB’s Braves and NFL’s Falcons had to play in Atlanta Stadium, one of the worst homes for professional sports ever constructed. Like many of the football-baseball stadiums built in the 1960s, it wasn’t really well-suited for either, with the overly large and extended layout that made it adequate for football games putting baseball spectators far from the action. But Atlanta Stadium was even worse than comparable two-sport facilities like, say, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati or Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Constructed in a rush in only eleven months in 1964-65 so the Braves would have a place to play when they arrived from their previous home in Milwaukee, the stadium was built on the cheap, and it showed before the decade was out. Atlanta’s hot and humid summers aged the concrete so that before long, the stadium appeared seedy and crumbling. This was compounded by its location–convenient to where several major Atlanta freeways merged, but also to several of the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods, which soon put those who parked near the stadium (or occasionally, in the stadium parking lot itself) at risk for muggings and car break-ins.
While the Omni, home of the NBA’s Hawks and NHL’s Flames and built in 1973, appeared at first to be a far nicer facility, better located in Atlanta’s downtown and winning awards for its innovative design, it soon revealed a fatal flaw that soon made it an even more problematic facility than Atlanta Stadium. Its roof was built with a briefly popular kind of steel known as Cor-Ten, which over time was supposed to develop a protective rust coating that prevented corrosion. Even aside from the fact that this rust coating after a few years gave the Omni a decidedly seedy appearance, the material had only been tested in cooler climates, Again, Atlanta’s hot and humid weather went to work, so that the Omni’s ceiling developed holes within a decade. Even when patched, these holes led to leaks that caused whole sections of seating or playing area to be constantly wet during rainy weather, as well as attracting mold and rodents. Local legends developed about the size of sewer rats that fans frequently encountered in the Omni restrooms.
Nor were those even the only problems. The Atlanta Falcons, in particular, suffered from a clueless owner who put his business buddies in charge of the team rather than football professionals, creating a poorly-run franchise that positively alienated Atlanta fans.
But even besides the Falcons’ special problems, an already busy sports schedule, bad teams, and substandard playing facilities created a negative feedback loop in which few people attended any of Atlanta’s major league teams, starving the organizations of money they could have used for better players or facilities, which in turn led to lower fan attendance. No wonder that by the mid-1970s, Atlanta was known as “Loserville.”
One thing that fascinated me about the book was learning about sports other than baseball. I’ve read many baseball books over the years, covering players, teams, and the industry as a whole, but knew relatively little about the history of the other sports. Basketball, especially, was a subject where I had a real gap in my knowledge, apparently. I learned a lot from the book about how the early NBA was organized. I hadn’t realized, for instance, that the NBA started out as a mostly mid-western league that later expanded or relocated its teams to larger markets. Early on, Fort Wayne, Buffalo, Providence, and even Waterloo, Iowa, had teams. In fact, the Atlanta Hawks started in Buffalo, with stops in Moline, Illinois, and Milwaukee before ending up in St. Louis in 1955. It was from St. Louis that Atlanta poached the team in 1968.
But even more than just sports history, Loserville covers a number of ancillary topics. Chapters on race relations in Atlanta help explain why African Americans provided so little support to the city’s teams. Atlanta Stadium had actually been built on the former site of a black neighborhood that had been bulldozed just a few years before in the name of slum clearance, but really to make way for sections of the I-20, I-75, and I-85 interstates. The leftover unused land was supposed to be dedicated to affordable housing, but the Housing Authority instead sold it to the Atlanta Stadium authority. It’s no wonder resentful black citizens looked at the stadium as an unwanted imposition, rather than as a potential entertainment destination, and basically boycotted the Braves and Falcons.
Meanwhile, while basketball was increasingly popular among blacks nationwide in the 1960s and 1970s, the owners of the Atlanta Hawks intentionally sold off the talented black players they inherited when moving the team from St. Louis in 1968. In their place, they acquired Pete Maravich, a popular white player who had played at LSU, in hopes of attracting white fans. This move in fact did little to attract a white fanbase, while alienating potential black fans. Moreover, by giving Maravich a huge contract, the owners could not afford to supply him with the quality of teammates needed for a good team (Maravich’s showboating play style may not have helped), causing the Hawks to become yet another perpetually losing Atlanta team.
I haven’t even gotten into the book’s discussions of Atlanta mass transit, property development, politics, and the special affinity of Georgians for professional wrestling, all of which are explored in some detail in Loserville. In fact, there is such a density of interesting fact and analysis in Trutor’s book that I am awarding it with my coveted Shortcuts to Smartness tag, bestowed only rarely and solely to those books that “so expand your knowledge and understanding in so many areas that they are like a college course in and of themselves.”
If there’s one drawback to Loserville, it’s that it is written in a somewhat academic style that I think some readers will find too dry and occasionally repetitive. Not me, as the information contained was fascinating enough that I didn’t think it needed any embellishment. I found the book’s clear, straightforward presentation of often complicated arguments to be lucid and appropriate to its purpose. If you require a bit of humor or flamboyance in a book, you might want to skip this one. But I can highly recommend Loserville to readers who want a complete and thoroughly-researched exploration of every aspect of the history of Atlanta professional sports.