Of course, this book includes athletes like Billy Jean King, Babe Didrikson Zaharaias, Nadia Comaneci, Renée Richards, and Diana Nyad. You’ve heard about them, but you may not know that Olympian Abby Hoffman masqueraded as a boy when she was 9 years old, in order to play hockey in Canada. You may not know about the abuse the first female pro-baseball umpire got during ump school, the jeers the first female Boston Marathon runner endured, or the record snatched from Kitty O’Neil. You might have seen an in-your-face move by skater Surya Bonaly, but you don’t know what bullfighter Conchita Cintrón did, or that Negro League baseballer Toni Stone cheekily befriended prostitutes while on the road. Because of what an autopsy revealed, you might not know about Stella Walsh at all. And there’s a chance that many of these women couldn’t have reached their goals or made history without the efforts of Bernice Sandler and Edith Green.
Wow, are there a lot of surprises inside “Game Changers.”
Even rabid sports fans will find something new hiding here, in part because author Schiot includes mini-chapters on women athletes in a huge variety of sports. Fans will find everything from the archery to zooming race cars, balls to boats, journalism, hiking, climbing, skating, and coaching.
(“Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History” by Molly Schiot, c.2016, Simon & Schuster, $25/$34, Canada, 310 pages.)
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