List of Illustrations

1.1 Trotters Mountain Boy and Lady Thorn head for the finish line at Prospect Park in Brooklyn in 1869
1.2 The sleek yacht America is captured by artist J. E. Buttersworth as it leaves Boston harbor on its way to England for the great race of 1851
2.1 The Knickerbocker team of 1858 is captured in this rare photograph
2.2 A standing-room crowd packs the Baltimore Orioles ballpark in 1897 for an important game with Boston
3.1 John L. Sullivan squares off with Jake Kilrain in the backwoods of Mississippi in July 1889
3.2 Golf provided women with a new opportunity to develop their athletic skills as private country clubs were established at the turn of the twentieth century
3.3 Jim Thorpe during the shot put competition in the decathlon at the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm
4.1 This typical formation employed by the 1893 Yale football team illustrates the theory of mass momentum advocated by Walter Camp
4.2 The trend away from mass momentum play received a boost from the offensive play of the Carlisle Indians coached by the innovative Glenn “Pop” Warner
5.1 Ty Cobb slides into third base with his spikes flying
5.2 Forward March! The Cleveland Indians participate in marching drills ordered for all American League teams during the 1918 season by league president Ban Johnson
5.3 Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis tosses out the first ball at an unknown game during the 1920s
5.4 Babe Ruth burnished his public image by reaching out to youngsters
6.1 Vassar College students demonstrate that they did not necessarily always “play nice” when they took to the basketball court
6.2 A determined Babe Didrikson preparing for the 1932 Olympic Games
6.3 A professional women's baseball player slides hard into third base
7.1 Seabiscuit drives between two horses to take the lead in the home stretch of his last race, the 1940 Santa Anita Handicap
8.1 Seventy-three thousand fans jam Memorial Stadium at the University of California in Berkeley for the Big Game against Stanford in 1928
8.2 Red Grange runs around Michigan tacklers in 1924
8.3 Journalist Grantland Rice called the Notre Dame backfield the “Four Horsemen”
9.1 Defending champion Jack Johnson and challenger Jim Jeffries square off in the first of many “fights of the century”
9.2 Josh Gibson shows his powerful swing in a game played in Pittsburgh
9.3 Sprinter Jesse Owens explodes out of his starting position in classic fashion
9.4 Jackie Robinson steals home with his usual flourish against Philadelphia on July 2, 1950
9.5 Althea Gibson shows her crisp backhand form in this match at Wimbledon in the 1957 finals against fellow American Darlene Hard
10.1 The “Monday Night” ABC team appears on camera before a game in 1971
11.1 Bo Schembechler played for Woody Hayes at Miami of Ohio before serving a coaching apprenticeship with him at Ohio State
11.2 Between 1964 and 1975 UCLA won 10 NCAA championships under the coaching of John Wooden
11.3 Bob Knight coached basketball at Indiana from 1971 to 2000, winning eleven Big Ten and three NCAA championships
12.1 Willie Mays was one of the most complete baseball players in history
12.2 Vince Lombardi during the first Super Bowl played in Los Angeles against the Kansas City Chiefs on January 15, 1967
12.3 Many sports observers believe Chicago Bulls forward Michael Jordan to have been the greatest athlete of the twentieth century
12.4 Contemporary NASCAR fans would scarcely recognize the popular sport of stock car racing from this 1953 photograph at the Daytona Speedway
13.1 Action at the net in the dramatic 1980 Olympics semifinal hockey game between the United States and the Soviet Union
13.2 Bob Mathias competing in the discus throw at the 1952 Olympic Games held in Helsinki
13.3 American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists in a Black Power salute at Mexico City in 1968
14.1 Muhammad Ali with the outspoken Black Muslim leader Malcolm X
14.2 Henry Aaron played the game of baseball with a healthy respect for its traditions
14.3 Tiger Woods led a seemingly near-perfect life for the first 15 years of his professional career
14.4 The Williams sisters congratulate each other after Serena beat Venus at the 2009 Wimbledon finals
15.1 Maya Moore of Connecticut drives to the basket against Rutgers in a Big East Conference game in Hartford on February 3, 2009
15.2 Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs pose in New York City for a promotional photograph before their famous “battle of the sexes” in 1973
15.3 Mia Hamm's triumphant soccer career inspired a new generation of young girls to take up the game
16.1 Pete Rose in one of his signature head-first slides
16.2 Promoter Don King congratulates Mike Tyson after he won a unanimous decision over James “Bonecrusher” Smith in Las Vegas in 1987
17.1 Two of golf's greatest players line up a putt during the 1973 Ryder Cup in St Louis
E.1 It was a euphoric time when coach Joe Paterno's Penn State team defeated Georgia in the Sugar Bowl on January l, 1983 to capture the national championship

Introduction

During the early years of the nineteenth century, the word sport carried a much different connotation than it does today. To be a sporting man in the mid-nineteenth century was to be someone who flouted the rules of social acceptability by gravitating toward activities deemed inappropriate for a proper gentleman. The term sport was, in fact, used to identify men who embraced the bachelor culture of the tavern, where amid a haze of cigar smoke and the odor of stale beer and cheap whiskey, they watched cockfights and dogfights, bet on an upcoming horse race or baseball match, and won or lost money on the toss of the dice or the turn of a card. Upon special occasions they might even watch pugilists bloody each other in a bare-knuckle prizefight.

There also emerged during the same time period a group of men referred to as sportsmen. These were men of good social standing who found outlets from their pressing business and professional lives as participants and spectators in such activities as sailing, swimming, horse racing, foot racing, rowing, and baseball. By century's end they likely had also gravitated toward popular new activities such as tennis, bicycle racing, football, golf, basketball, and volleyball. As these sports grew in popularity, sportsmen (now joined by a small but growing number of sportswomen) mimicked trends within the professional and business worlds by striving to achieve order and stability. They established amateur and professional leagues and associations, published statistics, developed and marketed specialized equipment, and enforced written rules governing athletic competition.

Although sports and games revealed a distinctly provincial quality in 1800, by the beginning of the twentieth century spontaneity and informality had been replaced by formalized structures, written rules, and bureaucratic organization. Befitting the growing specialization within the emerging national marketplace, a small number of skilled athletes were even able to work at play, earning their living as professional athletes. Several of the new sports provided women opportunities to participate, although under carefully constrained conditions. In this rapidly changing environment, the word sport lost much of its negative connotation. Now, to be a sporting man or woman was to be involved in a robust new American lifestyle. By the early twentieth century, organized sports had assumed a prominent place in American life, reflective of the exuberant capitalistic and democratic spirit of a rapidly maturing society.

This book traces the evolution of American sports, from its unorganized and quaint origins to the present time. The narrative is organized around the argument that sports, for good or for ill, have been a significant social force throughout the history of the United States. In recent years, historians have come to recognize that games have revealed many of the underlying values of society. Rather than being irrelevant diversions of little consequence, such activities provide important insights into fundamental values and beliefs. The games people played may have provided a convenient means of releasing tensions or a means of escaping the realities of the day, but they also provided rituals that linked generations and united communities.

The essential assumption of this book is that throughout American history the form and purpose of sporting events have been closely connected to the larger society from which they arose. As but one recent example: during the days immediately following the terrorist attack upon the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, on September 11, 2001, Americans found reassurance in expressing their national unity and resolve through highly symbolic patriotic exercises conducted prior to the start of baseball and football games. National leaders urged the resumption of sports schedules as soon as it became apparent that no more attacks were imminent, viewing the playing of games as an emphatic statement of national resolve that the terrorists would not disturb the rhythms of everyday American life.

Sports in American Culture

Organized sports in the nineteenth century grew naturally with the new systems of transportation, manufacturing, and commercial organization. During the twentieth century they grew exponentially, propelled to prominence by the new communications mediums of radio, motion pictures, newspapers, and television. In contemporary America, sports have become an enormous multibillion-dollar enterprise. Professional football and baseball franchises are valued at between $500 million upwards to $3 billion, and nearly every major American city has in recent years spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build sports arenas and stadiums to accommodate professional teams. Most major professional teams operate on annual budgets that exceed $200 million, and major college athletic programs have annual budgets ranging between $30 million and $150 million. An oft-overlooked ancillary economic activity attests to the importance Americans place upon sporting events: conservative estimates are that gamblers bet at least $4 billion a year on sporting events, a figure larger than the gross national product of several less developed countries. At least 20 percent of the news reported in any daily urban newspaper is devoted to the activities of a small handful of that city's prominent residents who dribble basketballs, hit baseballs, or knock each other to the ground with intense ferocity. Radio and television networks provide 24-hour coverage of America's sports to a seemingly insatiable audience, and a complex infrastructure of social media web sites and blogs have in recent years added a new and increasingly influential layer to the communications mix.

My first effort to examine the role of sports in American life presented the argument that a broad swath of the American people were obsessed with sports; at the time I thought my interpretation would engender considerable criticism, but instead it resonated with general readers as well as those in academia.¹ In many ways, America's obsession with sports and the men and women who play the games has intersected in unsuspected ways with larger issues of public policy. For example, in many cities students attend public schools in dilapidated buildings with leaking roofs and outmoded classrooms and laboratories, and are taught by underpaid teachers using tattered out-of-date textbooks. City streets go unrepaired, libraries close, and public hospitals struggle to deal with patient loads, but in these same cities, civic leaders eagerly cater to the demands of professional teams. The owners – multimillionaires all – enjoy a special kind of public welfare through their lucrative agreements with local governments. Crucial social services might go untended, but time and again, taxpayers vote in favor of a tax increase to build a new arena or stadium and public officials placate team owners by granting tax breaks, sweetheart deals on rental fees, and control of concessions and parking. For the fortunate few franchise owners, their costs have been socialized through active government subsidies, their profits privatized.

Between 1980 and 2010, nearly every major American city constructed lavish new sports venues for several professional teams, often to the serious neglect of other community needs. Just as the citizenry of medieval European communities revealed their essential values by constructing imposing cathedrals in the town square, so too have modern American cities given expression to their priorities and values by erecting enormous sports facilities.

Sports and American History

The pages that follow examine the role of sports within the broader context of the major themes of American history. This book is an extension of major trends of the last quarter century that have reshaped the way historians look at the past. The historical profession, which had long focused its attention on political, economic, and diplomatic themes, was fundamentally affected by the social upheavals of the 1960s. A new generation of students, who questioned many of the existing myths about the “Establishment,” demanded courses in African American, Hispanic, and Native American history, and fresh perspectives on the American experience written from the vantage point of the poor, women, and the working class.

It was within this period of intellectual ferment that scholars first began a serious examination of the role of sports in American history. The extensive body of literature upon which this book is based reveals that most of the writing on the history of American sports before the mid-1970s was done outside the academy, but in recent decades professional historians have produced important books and articles that explore the relationship of American sports with larger social issues. In 1972, the first professional society in the United States devoted to the field of sports history was established, and several pioneering scholars made laudable efforts to provide a meaningful synthesis.² A few courses on the history of baseball had been taught previously, but in the ensuing decades more inclusive histories of American sports were introduced. Academic publishers began releasing a growing number of scholarly monographs on the subject of sports. History survey textbooks now included pictures of early baseball parks or college football games along with the more conventional images of soldiers, presidents, and smoke-belching factories and train locomotives. But resistance, or at least persistent apathy, has slowed the integration of sports into broader cultural contexts in the curricula of the humanities and social sciences.

The emergence of sports history as a serious scholarly endeavor is no small achievement, because within any college or university there are faculty members who decry the existence of intercollegiate sports programs. A national survey I conducted in 1999 indicated that the overwhelming number of specialized upper-division and graduate-level American courses in social history still do not include the role of sports, and that history departments remained reluctant to conduct searches for faculty with sports as a focus of their teaching and research.

The rationale for this resistance is not surprising. Many faculty members have rightfully objected to gargantuan athletic department budgets and the simultaneous exploitation and coddling of athletes on their campuses, and have been outraged by the many scandals that have time-and-again besmirched the image of American higher education. Tenured faculty who offer seminars in American social history have built their research programs on other important cultural connections – the arts, labor, motion pictures, literature, immigration, class, gender, and the list goes on. Few graduate programs provide encouragement to graduate students to undertake serious research in sports-related topics, and those that select them are routinely warned that their placement in the academic marketplace could easily be jeopardized. Such was the case of Yale doctoral student Warren Goldstein who in the 1970s opted to present a dissertation on the history of baseball. His Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball became a landmark study that opened up scholarly potentials for future scholars. Nonetheless, he reports that his dissertation topic made his search for a tenure-track university position a difficult and prolonged exercise.³

This text will examine many themes, but throughout the roles of gender and race are pervasive. Writing in 1994, two scholars who have made major contributions to the literature exploring the cultural context of American sports, Elliott J. Gorn and Michael Oriard, called for scholars engaged in sociology, literature, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and history to explore the many ways where their cultural studies intersect with sports: “Where is there a cultural activity more freighted with constructions of masculinity than football, more deeply inscribed with race than boxing, more tied in the public mind to the hopes and hopelessness of inner-city youth than basketball?” Taking note of the heavy emphasis being placed upon multiculturalism in contemporary college curricula, they pointed to the pervasive role of sports in the mass media. “It is almost a cliché,” they wrote, “to mention that sports are the lingua franca of men talking across divisions of class and race. Sports can reveal just how interdependent particular subcultures and the larger consumer culture can be. Think, for example, of the symbiotic ties between inner-city playground basketball and the National Basketball Association.”⁴

On a superficial level, from the colonial period to the present, sporting events have provided a useful diversion from the pressures of daily life. Just as colonists tossed a ball or watched a horserace to enliven their lives, so too do contemporary Americans follow the ups and downs of their favorite teams, put $10 in the office bracket competition on the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball tournament, enjoy a weekend game of golf or tennis, and play on their church's co-ed slow-pitch softball team. On a more serious level, parents, religious leaders, educators, and moral reformers have used sports to teach new generations the values of fair play, honesty, perseverance, and cooperation. Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Barack Obama have interjected themselves into the public debate over sports issues. President George W. Bush was part owner and managing partner of a major-league baseball team, the Texas Rangers, before his election as governor of Texas in 1994.

Sporting venues have often provided a stage on which Americans have dealt with the paramount issues of race and sexual discrimination. Students can learn much about the nature of American race relations by examining the Negro Baseball Leagues, the “fight of the century” between Jack Johnson and Jim Jeffries, the triumphs and tragedies of track star Jesse Owens, or the courage and resolution of Jackie Robinson in challenging the unwritten exclusionary racial covenant of organized baseball. Students interested in the dynamics of the women's rights movement can similarly draw insights from the struggles against entrenched sexism in both amateur and professional sports by such gifted athletes as Gertrude Ederle, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Wilma Rudolph, and Billie Jean King. Political battles over the development of athletic programs for schoolgirls and college women during the past five decades have been, and remain, an integral part of a much larger national struggle against gender discrimination.

For the purpose of this book, the word sport entails an organized competitive activity between participants that requires some combination of skill and physical prowess. Thus, such games as baseball, volleyball, and tennis are considered sports; chess, backgammon, and bridge are not. Some competitive games played primarily for pleasure or exercise, such as croquet, badminton, horseshoes, jogging, and aerobics are likewise excluded from this definition, but stock car and marathon races fit comfortably within the definition. Professional wrestling, despite its popularity, is excluded because it is a loosely scripted entertainment spectacle rather than a competitive contest. Similarly, junk sports such as roller derby and motocross are excluded, along with choreographed performance spectacles such as water ballet, figure skating, and ice dancing. In recent years, new sports have emerged out of what were originally recreational pursuits: snowboarding, skateboarding, and mixed martial arts. Although hunters and fishermen refer to themselves as “sportsmen” and while professional fishermen sometimes engage in tournaments, those activities are considered here to be of a recreational nature.

This is an examination of the world of sports as it intersects with the larger themes and issues of American life. American sports, at their best, have provided us with inspiring stories of courage, grace, drama, excitement, and accomplishment. Conversely, they have also brought out for all to see depressing examples of brutality, cruelty, racism, sexism, stupidity, intolerance, homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism, greed, and hypocrisy. Both extremes are on display in the pages that follow. In many respects, these pages present my personal take on the role of sports in American history, a culmination of a lifetime spent as a participant in and close observer of the American sports scene, and, for the past 25 years, as a professor exploring the fascinating saga of sports in the American experience as a researcher and classroom instructor.

For better or for worse, sports have played an integral part in the history of the United States, providing Americans with a venue in which major cultural and social issues have been debated, contested, and, in some notable instances, resolved. In a sense, this book seeks to examine the American past through the prism of sports. It is not simply a story of the winners and losers, nor is it a chronicle of the individual achievements of athletes. This is a book intended for the serious student interested in examining the American past from the perspective of sports.

Notes

2 See the Journal of Sport History published by the North American Society for Sport History. For the early histories and related studies of the broad expanse of American sports history and American society's embrace of sports, see Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play: A History of Popular Recreation, 1607–1940 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940); John R. Betts, America's Sporting Heritage, 1850–1950 (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1974); John A. Lucas and Ronald A. Smith, Saga of American Sports (New York: Lea & Febiger, 1978); James A. Michener, Sports in America (New York: Random House, 1976); Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1983; 6th edn, 2009); Douglas Noverr and Lawrence E. Ziewacz, The Games They Played: Sports in American History (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1988); Elliott J. Gorn and Warren Jay Goldstein, A Brief History of American Sports (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993); and Steven A. Riess, Major Problems in American Sport History (Boston: Cengage, 2013). Three authors provide a global perspective on the history of sports: Richard D. Mandell, Sport: A Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984); William J. Baker, Sports in the Western World (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1982); and Allen Guttmann, Sports: The First Five Millennia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004). Students might begin their study of the phenomenon of American sports with Michael Mandelbaum's thought-provoking The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do (New York: Public Affairs Press, 2004).

Cover photo

Sports in American Life

A History

Dedication