Willy Meisl, “King of the Sports Journalists”

Willy Meisl was an Austrian-Jewish sports journalist who dominated the field during the Weimar Republic. A son of Viennese coffee houses, Meisl intellectualised sports writing in the interwar years, covering themes like professionalism, tactics and sporting antiquity for wide audiences, in styles more commonly found in the newspapers’ culture sections. Contemporaries called him the King of the Sports Journalists. But his work was affected profoundly by the Nazis’ rise to power, whereupon he bega