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Both cities grappled with suburbanization and white flight, and both undertook ambitious urban renewal efforts. Both cities experienced contentious race relations and labor relations. Both cities had inferiority complexes, with Oakland worrying about being overshadowed by San Francisco and Kansas City worrying about being seen as a “cow town.” Both cities had boosterish newspapers with sports editors who led campaigns to attract major league franchises. Q: What is the most interesting discovery you made while researching and writing your book?Īlthough Oakland and Kansas City are geographically far apart and they differ significantly in a number of ways, their histories have much in common.

And there are many fine books about Oakland and its teams written by such people as Beth Bagwell, Robert Self, Jane Rhodes, Peter Richmond, and Jason Turbow, to list just a few.

My late father George Ehrlich was an urban historian his architectural history of Kansas City showed how you could tell the story of a city by looking at its buildings, just as I’m trying to tell the story of two cities by looking at their sports teams. David Maraniss’s books-especially When Pride Still Mattered, a biography of Vince Lombardi-are good examples of how to put sports into historical and cultural context. Winning It All by sportswriter Joe McGuff (whom I grew up reading in the Kansas City Star) tells of the early years of the Kansas City Chiefs. There were lots of them! Ball Four by major league pitcher Jim Bouton is a funny and revealing look at baseball as it existed at about the time I eventually would write about. After nobody else wrote the book I wanted to read, I finally decided to write it myself. And it all took place during a time of epic and wrenching change in both professional sports and U.S. Some of sports’ most famous and flamboyant personalities were involved-people like Reggie Jackson, George Brett, Hank Stram, Al Davis, Lamar Hunt, and Charles O. Oakland had lured away Kansas City’s original major league baseball team, which only added to the bitterness. The teams had fought one another fiercely over the years and on occasion had gotten into full-scale brawls. As I grew older, I kept thinking that the rivalry between the two cities’ teams would make for an interesting book for several reasons. I grew up in Kansas City with the Kansas City-Oakland sports rivalry, first between football’s Raiders and Chiefs in the late 1960s and then between baseball’s A’s and Royals in the early 1970s. Q: Why did you decide to write this book? Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era. He recently answered some questions about his new book, Kansas City vs. His books include Heroes and Scoundrels: The Image of the Journalist in Popular Culture and Radio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest. Ehrlich is a professor emeritus of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.