If you’ve read my author bio, you’ll probably have noticed that a good portion of my completed articles and works in progress have sports as a major topic. In this piece I want to talk about what it is that moves me to turn out those articles; I’d also like to open a window into the specific thought processes behind some of those articles and talk about what I think is an unfortunate void in the AH genre today. For all the intriguing premises that have been dealt with in both online uchronia and printed alternate history literature, few if any authors to date have ever attempted to write any AH works using moments in sports history as a point of divergence; for that matter, there aren’t very many future history pieces about sports.

So you could say that one of my motives is try to, if not totally eliminate that void, at least shrink it down a bit. Another motive-- to borrow a line from the good folks who produce DC Comics’ Elseworlds series --is to take familiar names and put them in unfamiliar settings and thereby offer a fresh spin on the best-known brands and faces in the athletic world. In the case of some of the future history pieces I’ve turned out for CTT, I also like to occasionally take a stab at forecasting how certain situations in the sporting field might play out if they ever came to pass. Furthermore, a part of me wistfully yearns to rewrite the history book regarding some of Boston’s most painful heartbreaks on the athletic field; AH offers me the perfect venue for this particular little exercise in wish fulfillment. Last but not least, quite frankly it’s a lot of fun to let my imagination run wild when it comes to these scenarios.

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OK, now that I’ve talked about the general motivations that drive me to turn out sports-themed AH timelines, I’d like to get down to the specific nuts and bolts of some of those timelines. Case in point: my recent Super Bowl 20 ATL one-shot "Bear-Hunting". Some of you might be tempted to believe that "Bear-Hunting" was a reaction to the New York Giants’ upset victory in Super Bowl 42, but the article was actually inspired by a 1998 article from former Sports Illustrated columnist and current ESPN Magazine commentator Rick Reilly. Titled "Hey, Guys, Get A (Poli-)Grip!", it took the ’72 Miami Dolphins alumni to task for what he saw as the unsportsmanlike glee with which they seem to react every time an NFL team¹ falls short in its bid to achieve an undefeated season. After I read that feature, I started to contemplate how the Bears’ own brash attitude might have come back to bite them and the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Another case where real life provided the inspiration for one of my AH sports-themed articles is the story "Jambo Olympus!"². In the 113 years since the modern Olympic Games were founded by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, no African city has ever hosted the Summer Games and very few African cities have even been considered as potential hosts for the games; naturally, as soon as I found that out I started drawing a mental blueprint of the circumstances which might finally bring the Games to Africa. The reason I decided to pick Johannesburg as the site for my hypothetical future African Olympics is that post-apartheid South Africa seems to be emerging as one of the continent’s bona fide athletic superpowers.

In my series "Full-Court Press" and "Bases Loaded", I basically fast-forwarded real sports history as an exercise in imagining how American history in general and sports history in particular might have been affected if there had been an earlier westward expansion of, respectively, the NBA and Major League Baseball. With "Bases Loaded" I was also trying to craft a scenario of how American history might have been reshaped if William Randolph Hearst had turned from his original business of newspaper publishing to the field of professional sports.

But of all the sports-themed ATL articles I’ve submitted to Changing the Times to date, my personal favorite would have to be "Deep In The Heart Of Texas", my account of the Houston Astros winning the 1986 National League Championship Series. Doing that article was not only a fun exercise in imagining how Houston could have gotten its first NL pennant 20 years sooner than it did in OTL, it was also a therapeutic means of purging myself of the last shreds of heartache which were still lingering in my psyche from when things fell apart for the Red Sox in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

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The hardest sports ATL feature I’ve done? That would probably have to be "Blood On The Ice", my future history one-shot about how a riot could break out at the Winter Olympics. All too often since the end of the Second World War, we’ve come alarmingly close to having a tragedy that leads to mass casualties unfold at the Olympic Games; the nearest we’ve been to having a scenario like the one in "Blood" become reality was the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. I hope the gruesome storyline portrayed in "Blood" never actually comes to pass.

Getting back to "Deep In The Heart Of Texas", I used some of the actual events from the OTL Game 6 of the 1986 World Series as a kind of model for the portrayal of my ATL’s Game 6 of the National League Championship Series. As for that bit about the ball taking a hop off the Astroturf, that comes from observation of Astros games back when they were still playing at the Astrodome. Back in the day, baseballs could, under the right conditions, bounce around on the Astrodome turf like the Tasmanian Devil after six cans of Red Bull.

Another instance in which I fast-forwarded real sports history is my hockey-themed series "Year of the Cat", which tackled the question of how the course of NHL evolution might have changed if the league had expanded to Florida sooner than it actually did. It’s not entirely out of the question that the league might have set up expansion teams in the Sunshine State before the 1990s; as early as 1974 there was an NHL team in Kansas City, and the present-day Calgary Flames got their start in the late 1970s as the Atlanta Flames. In fact, the ‘70s were an era where expansion teams seemed to be springing up on every third street corner and new leagues were as common as grains of sand. I was still in grade school when America had its first brief flirtation with professional soccer, but I can still remember the hoopla that greeted the formation of the North American Soccer League.

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For my one-shot articles "Scarface" and "In Memoriam: George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth, 1935-1988", I decided to try my hand at one of AH’s most popular sub-genres, the alternate biography. In the case of the first, I speculated on how being steered into boxing might have changed Al Capone’s life both for the better and for the worse; as for the second, I was speculating on how the Babe might have coped with the challenges of playing in the dawn of the era of televised sports. But in both cases, I was enjoying the opportunity to look at familiar faces in a new light.

In one of my most recent sports-themed ATL contributions, the series "Hail To The Chiefs", I decided to take a stab at speculating on how the history of pro football in America over the past four-plus decades might have been changed if Kansas City had pulled off the upset against Green Bay in the first Super Bowl. And I’m not done yet with spinning sports-related AH scenarios; I’m working at least three other such timelines while you read this, and I figure on coming up with even more by the time the next issue of Changing The Times goes to press.

I also figure on crafting more future history sports-themed TLs, like the "Blood Feud" series I currently have in development. Like "Jambo Olympus!" and "Blood on the Ice", "Blood Feud" is intended to be an exploration of how events in the sports world might affect our society as a whole in years to come; in this case, the topic at hand is how the currently popular sport of mixed martial arts might find its survival threatened-- or at a bare minimum seriously hampered -- by the litigation-happy culture that’s taken root in America over the last twenty-odd years.

Some of the titles for my sports-themed articles just come to me naturally. Case in point: "Bases Loaded". When I first got the idea to adapt my old Los Angeles baseball timeline from Othertimelines.com for CTT, it took me all of two seconds-- if that long --to decide that "Bases Loaded" would be the ideal name for the CTT mix of that series. The same thing happened with "Full-Court Press", the CTT adaptation of my old Houston basketball TL from Othertimes.com.³ On the other side of the coin, however, when I was developing the preliminary idea for what would eventually become "Year of the Cat" I must have gone through and rejected at least eight separate possible titles before I came up with one which fit. As for "Blood on the Ice", it took me at least a dozen tries to get that one right.

And on that note, I’ll ring down the curtain on this article. For those of you who’ve taken the time to read my sports-themed AH pieces, a thousand thanks; if you can think of any concepts for sports-related alternate history or future history I haven’t tackled yet, feel free to e-mail them to me at ChrisO_01801@yahoo.com-- or if you’re feeling daring, you can take a stab at them yourself. In any case, I’m looking forward to hearing from you.