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.