Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 10/11/2009

10/11/1959:
Bert Bell, commissioner of the National Football League, suffers a fatal heart attack at Franklin Field in Philadelphia while watching the Eagles play the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was 65 years old and had served as commissioner since 1946. Ironically, in Bell's early days moving up the ladder in pro football, he had owned both the Eagles and the Steelers at various times. During his tenure, he arranged a merger with the AAFC and presided over the league during the early days when television began to make a huge impact by establishing Sundays as the "pro football" day of the week, resulting in a dramatic surge in attendance for the NFL, which had labored for decades in the shadows of the college game.

Birthdays:
Maria Bueno b. 1939
Steve Young b. 1961
Dmitri Young b. 1973
Jason Arnott b. 1974
Michelle Wie b. 1989

GOING DOWN UNDER

The contradictions that are Australia—land and sea, Aborigine and European, criminals and missionaries, ancient and modern—are brought vividly to life through the story of William Thornhill, a petty criminal exiled from London to New South Wales in 1806 with his wife, Sal. Through their struggles, hard-won successes, fears, and brushes with death, this stunning novel “conveys the enormous tragedy of Australia’s founding through the moral compromises of a single ordinary man,” wrote Ron Charles in The Washington Post. The Secret River won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Publishing Industry Book of the Year Award, and many other accolades.

THE SECRET RIVER, by Kate Grenville (Canongate, 2007)