Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports

SB Nation writer Trutor debuts with a fascinating and comprehensive survey of Atlanta’s “first decade as a major league city.” While, on its face, the formation of the NHL Flames in 1972 helped the metropolis find unprecedented success as “one of only nine North American cities with franchises in all four major professional sports leagues,” Trutor reveals that the reality failed to meet expectations. As he writes, lackluster performances from the city’s pro teams—MLB’s Braves, the NFL’s Falcons, the Flames, and the NBA’s Hawks—led to such fan apathy by the mid-1970s that some ticket holders gave away their tickets for free by leaving them under their windshield wipers. Though the city’s corporate leadership saw acquiring professional sports franchises as a “matter of public policy” to promote “social cohesion,” Trutor underscores how that “top-down effort to construct a sense of community” faltered by further laying bare the divide between Atlanta’s impoverished inner-city Black majority and its elite “politically autonomous white suburbs.” In providing a cultural analysis of this epic flop in Atlanta sports history, Trutor also elucidates how other Sun Belt cities that pursued major league teams in the 1980s and ’90s—including Tampa and San Diego—suffered similar fates. It’s a brilliant look at the intricate ways sports and politics are intertwined. (Feb.)