The Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) is pleased to announce that Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star, by Tom Swift (University of Nebraska Press), has been named the winner of the 2009 Seymour Medal. In Chief Bender’s Burden, Swift provides a nuanced, novel-like biography of Charles Albert Bender, the first Native American to play in the American League and one of only two Native Americans in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Born in 1884 to an Ojibwe Indian mother and a German-American father, Bender spent his early years on the White Earth Reservation. Swift chronicles Bender’s development at the Carlisle Indian School and his big break and eventual rise to the pinnacle of baseball. Chief Bender’s Burden is the story of a paradoxical American sports hero, one who achieved a once-unfathomable celebrity while suffering the harsh injustices of a racially intolerant world.
Swift will receive the medal at the Seymour Medal Conference in Cleveland, April 24-26. Noted sports columnist and Cleveland native Joe Posnanski will be the keynote speaker. The Seymour Medal Conference takes place at the Radisson Hotel at Gateway, however, the opening reception for the conference will include a reading by Swift at The Lit (The Artcraft Building, 2570 Superior, Suite 203). The reception and reading begins at 7:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The Seymour Medal, named in honor of Dr. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Jane Mills (Seymour), is awarded each spring to the best book of baseball biography or history published in the previous calendar year. In addition to Chief Bender's Burden, the other finalists for this year’s award were The Father of Baseball: A Biography of Henry Chadwick by Andrew J. Schiff (McFarland) and Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees First Dynasty by Daniel R. Levitt (University of Nebraska Press). This year’s Seymour Medal Committee members included Peter Buckingham, Ron Kaplan, and Jon Daniels. The Seymour Medal Conference is presented with the support of the Cleveland Indians Baseball Club.
Tom Swift is an award-winning journalist, a freelance writer, and a member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He and his wife live in Minnesota.
SABR (pronounced “Saber”) is an international organization headquartered in Cleveland, OH. The Society's mission is to foster the study of baseball, to assist in developing and maintaining the history of the game, to facilitate the dissemination of baseball research and to stimulate interest in baseball.
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