More on sports history

A few more quick thoughts on the history of sports:

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I've been thinking about it, and I realized that I presented a rather narrow-minded perspective in Monday's post. I suggested that writing history about sports ran the risk of slipping fannish accounting of the outcome of games rather than placing sports in their larger social and cultural context. Of course, people do more than watch sports. They play them, too. To ignore the games that have no national (or even regional) audience is to miss out on a huge portion of the sporting experience. Tracing the story of, say, cricket on the village green or local non-professional football leagues can reveal more about British society and culture than responses to national sports events like the Bodyline tour or England's 1966 World Cup victory.

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That said, there's plenty to be gleaned from looking at popular responses to key moments in national sporting life. Patrick McDevitt's May the Best Man Win appears to be a sterling example of history that teases out the implications of international sports (I haven't read McDevitt's book, but Michael Paris's review in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Modern History provides a good summary). McDevitt locates the masculinization of organized sports in the early 19th century and goes on to show the tensions that arose when England was no longer dominant in such quintessentially English sports as rugby and cricket. If success in sports signified true masculinity, what did it mean for the English race if its men were no longer the best athletes in the world?

I haven't read McDevitt's book yet, but it looks to be well worth checking out.

The challenge of incorporating sports into history

Way back in May Sharon Howard pointed readers to a Frank Keating piece in the Guardian bemoaning the lack of sports* in social history. He attributes it to snobbish-ness on the part of academic historians, but ends by listing two recent social histories that do incorporate sports. So his point that historians neglect sports is dulled a bit.

Including sports in history can be a difficult task. It can be all too easy to get caught up in the internal details of the game and, as a result, miss the role that sports play within society. In a paper I wrote a few years ago on Philadelphians' memories of Veterans Stadium, I spent over a page describing in rather intricate detail the last two outs of the Phillies 1980 World Series victory. In retrospect, it's clear that my own interest in the outcome of the game itself sidetracked me from the thesis of the paper as a whole; that page could easily have been condensed into a few lines without weakening the argument.

The problem, then (at least for me), is abandoning the fan's perspective. While history cannot be bias-free, it can be over-indulgent. Readers who don't care about the Lord's Test during the West Indies' 1963 tour of England (to cite an example from Keating's article) can be excused for skipping ahead to the non-sports material. The larger significance of that Test, if Keating is to be believed, is that, during the summer of 1963, the whole of England was focused on the outcome of a game of cricket, that sports unified the country, if only for a moment (for what it's worth, a similar sort of thing occurred two years ago as England wrested the Ashes from Australia).

As a lifelong sports fan, I certainly appreciate Frank Keating's call for sports to be incorporated into social history. But I also recognize that the very passions that sports stir up make it difficult to write good history that incorporates sports without slipping into fandom. There's nothing wrong with being a fan, of course, but writing a story of what happened on the field (which is always a temptation) is barely more than antiquarianism -- interesting for fellow aficionados, but often missing the bigger point.

*I'm sticking with American usage. For the time being at least. I do find myself saying things like, "Chelsea are...", though, so it's probably a losing battle.