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Drafted at age eighteen, Robin Yount became an everyday starter for the Milwaukee Brewers in his first season and played his entire major league baseball career (1974-1993) with the Brewers. Yount led the team to the World Series in 1982 and earned two league MVP awards (shortstop, 1982; centerfield, 1989). Collecting more hits during the… Read More

Roller derby was a sports entertainment phenomenon in the 1950s, gained a new generation of fans via television in the 1970s, and underwent a twenty-first century resurgence with a feminist impulse. As part of this third wave of organized roller derby, the BrewCity Bruisers began holding “bouts” in 2006 at the Milwaukee County Sports Complex.… Read More

From 1900 through the 1940s, Milwaukee’s well-to-do often laced up their roller skates for an evening of “fashionable amusement” at the local skating rinks, most notably the Riverview and the Palomar. The former, overlooking the Milwaukee River on North Avenue, offered ladies’ instruction in both plain and fancy skating in the afternoon and hosted the… Read More

Numerous annual races serve as fundraisers for local charities and organizations. One of the largest of these, Briggs & Al’s Run & Walk for Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin, has raised over $14 million since its first running in 1977. The Milwaukee County Zoo’s Samson Stomp & Romp was first run in 1981; its proceeds benefit… Read More

From the turn of the twentieth century until the years immediately following World War II, grassroots baseball built around local teams and leagues was an important participatory and spectator sport in Milwaukee and in other major northeastern and midwestern cities. Operating below the level of full-fledged professionalism, the game played by these teams was commonly… Read More

Sheepshead is a popular American card game that originated in Central Europe during the eighteenth century. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the first major wave of European immigrants arrived in the United States. While the city of Milwaukee attracted immigrants of all kinds, Germans quickly became the largest immigrant population in the city;… Read More

A California import, skateboarding appeared in Milwaukee in the 1960s and rose in popularity in the 1970s. Local authorities perceived skating as dangerous and wasted little time banning it from most public places. According to contemporary accounts, this led to confrontations between skaters and authorities, which supported skateboarding’s outsider image. Nevertheless, skaters careened down the… Read More

Metropolitan Milwaukee boasts a rich history of youth, amateur, and semiprofessional soccer programs. It can even lay claim to holding the first recorded match in the United States, a challenge between Carroll College students and Waukesha youths in 1866. By the early twentieth century, clubs in the city of Milwaukee formed among immigrants in ethnic… Read More

Launched in 1968, Summerfest is a multi-day event held in June and July featuring music, food, shopping, and family activities that bring more than 800,000 people to the Henry W. Maier Festival Park on the Milwaukee lakefront. Billed as “The World’s Largest Music Festival” by the Guinness Book of World Records in 1999, fans of… Read More

For most American sports fans, tailgating brings to mind cool fall days, with smoke wafting through the parking lot in the hours before kickoff. However, for MILWAUKEE BREWERS fans, tailgating is the public manner in which one eats, drinks, plays, and socializes before the first pitch at Miller Park, where the parking lots function as… Read More

Milwaukee’s taverns were shaped by complex societal changes and largely defined by the lasting influence of the city’s large German population and significant brewing industry. Scattered along networks of dirt and plank roads connecting small settlements in Milwaukee and its surrounding counties, early wayside taverns were more than simply a place to get a drink.… Read More

Tennis traces its roots back to the early 1300s, but it emerged in its modern form as “lawn tennis” in England in 1874. The sport became immensely popular with the upper middle classes, who were challenging the power of the old aristocracy in the late Victorian era. The surging bourgeoisie still aped the ways of… Read More

According to the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, “Up North” is a relative term, more of a state of mind than an actual place. That’s especially true for people from Milwaukee. The Movoto travel guide states, “if a Milwaukeean says they’re headed ‘up north’ for the weekend, it means they’re taking a few days to simply… Read More

The Milwaukee Arena was the city’s major sports and entertainment facility when it opened in 1950. The Arena was home to Milwaukee’s first National Basketball Association team, the Hawks, and hosted events including the Tripoli Shrine Circus, Holiday on Ice, and orchestra concerts. One of the nation’s first venues designed to accommodate television broadcasting, the… Read More

The Wisconsin State Fair is an annual, eleven-day festival that celebrates Wisconsin farming, livestock, and agricultural products. The first Wisconsin State Fair took place in 1851, along the Rock River in Janesville. The fair lasted only two days, and 13,000-18,000 patrons attended the festivities. Over the next forty years the fair moved to various locations… Read More