IN THE RING WITH ALL PULP!

IN THE RING WITH ALL PULP!

I TALK SPORTS PULPS AND FIGHT CARD OVER AT ALL PULP . . . NEW PULP’S PREMIERE BLOG . . .

I’ve been a pulp fanatic for as long as I can remember, but not just for the hero pulps. The aviation pulps and the western pulps also caught my imagination along with the sports pulps . . . Wait? Sports pulps?

Yes! Sports pulps! While hero, adventure, weird menace, western, and aviation pulps are still hot collecting commodities, the sports pulps, like the romance pulps are mostly forgotten.

In my typical walking to the beat of a different drummer way, the sports pulps have become my passion. Street and Smiths Sport Story Magazine, Sports Novels, Fifteen Sports Stories, Dime Sports, and Thrilling Sports were among the best of the many sports pulps that proliferated between the late ‘20s and the mid ‘50s.

Baseball, track, and basketball strories dominated the early years of sports pulps. As football caught the American imagination, it too became a fertile source for the sports pulps. Horseracing, hockey, car racing also had their popular place in the sports pulps. Eventually, as the sports pulps proliferated, stories of almost any sporting contest – from log rolling to canoeing to powerboat racing – found their way between the pages. Even stories of soccer, rugby, and cricket can be found if one looks hard enough.

Pride of place in my collection of sports pulps, however, goes to Fight Stories Magazine. During the pulp era, boxing was even more popular than baseball both in the actual arena of sports and in the fictional creation of endless fisticuff dust-ups. There remains something elemental about one man pitted against another that continues to capture the imagination ... 

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