Ted Strong Jr.

August 29, 2016
Jenkins, president of a digital media company, provides an accessible telling of the fascinating life of Ted Strong Jr., who in the 1930s played with the Kansas City Monarchs in baseball's Negro Leagues and then with the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team of the 1940s. His father also played in the Negro Leagues, as did one of his younger brothers. The narrative focuses on the physical attributes that allowed Strong to dominate and touches on the obstacles that kept him from greater heights, including not being selected to join his contemporaries Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Buck O'Neil in integrating major-league baseball. Strong joined the Globetrotters in its infancy and helped create the showmanship known as "shadow-ball" that carries on today. Jenkins gives a wide-angle view instead of using a microscopic lens; he does little to highlight Strong's unsettled personal life or his extraordinary numbers or achievements. Most of the story comes from interviews with members of Strong's family, providing a solid look at a pioneering black athlete.

September 1, 2016
Ted Strong Jr. was one of the first two-sport professional athletes in the U.S. (baseball and basketball), but his career in baseball was overshadowed by Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson. A big, athletic kid, Strong, who learned sports from his father, a Negro League ballplayer and manager, played baseball for the famed Kansas City Monarchs while simultaneously playing basketball for Abe Saperstein's Harlem Globetrotters. Jenkins, a journalist and member of the Society for American Baseball Research, Negro Leagues Research Committee, sorts facts from myth about this talented athlete, who competed and excelled in the 1930s and 1940s; five years older than Robinson, he never got a shot at the big leagues. The text draws heavily on excerpts from African American newspapers, including the Chicago Defender, to document Strong's career, the changing climate of baseball, and the growing popularity of the Globetrotters' franchise in the 1940s. A significant sidebar in the early history of African American athletes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)