We Showed Baltimore: The Lacrosse Revolution of the 1970s and Richie Moran's Big Red

Description

In We Showed Baltimore, Christian Swezey tells the dramatic story of how a brash coach from Long Island and a group of players unlike any in the sport helped unseat lacrosse's establishment. From 1976 to 1978, the Cornell men's lacrosse team went on a tear. Winning two national championships and posting an overall record of 42-1, the Big Red, coached by Richie Moran, were the class of the NCAA game. Swezey tells the story of the rise of this dominant lacrosse program and reveals how Cornell's success coincided with and sometimes fueled radical changes in what was once a minor prep school game centered in the Baltimore suburbs. Moran coached the players to be fast and in constant movement. That technique, paired with the advent of synthetic stick heads and the introduction of artificial turf fields, made the Cornell offensive game swift and lethal. It is no surprise that the first NCAA championship game covered by ABC television was Cornell v. Maryland in 1976. The 16-13 Cornell win, in overtime, was exactly the exciting game that Moran encouraged and which newcomers to the sport wanted to see. Swezey recounts the dramatic games against traditional powers such as Maryland, Navy, and Johns Hopkins, and gets into the strategy and psychology that Moran brought to Cornell. We Showed Baltimore describes how the game of lacrosse was changing—its style of play, equipment, demographics, and geography. Pulling from interviews with more than ninety former coaches and players from Cornell and its rivals, We Showed Baltimore paints a vivid picture of lacrosse in the 1970s, and how Moran and the Big Red helped create the game of today.