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CHAPTER 3 A Linguistic Turn into Sport History MICHAEL ORIARD Icame to sport history from literary studies. To be more precise, for the past fifteen years or so I have been writing about the cultural history of American football while continuing to teach American literature at my day job; and it is in the conjunction of the two disciplines that I discovered my method for reconstructing football’s “cultural history.” There are many kinds of sport history, of course. The boundary between social and cultural history is particularly porous, and culture itself is a notoriously protean term. The culture that I explore in my own work is the web of ideas, beliefs, and meanings attached to football in the United States, as opposed to the cultural practices of participation and fandom. In locating those ideas, beliefs, and meanings in the mass media, I emphatically do not adopt the postmodern view that the mediated image—the copy, the “similacrum ,” the “hyperreality”—is all there is. The unique power of football depends on the actuality of what the players do in preparation and performance . Moreover, spectating, whether at home or at the stadium, is an active experience, at least for serious fans. I do not contend that football is just discourse but that the mediated narratives of football inform the public’s understanding and provoke its reactions. Though discussed here in a collection titled Deconstructing Sport History, my method in fact grew from a respect for old-fashioned empirical historiography. When, around 1990, I first took up the question of what football has meant in American life, I recognized two primary traditions on which I might draw: one deriving from the work of the myth-and-symbol scholars in American studies, the other from that of American sport sociologists. From the myth-and-symbol school had emerged a set of commonplaces about 75 American sport that had worked their way even into popular films: that baseball with its green spaces was fundamentally a pastoral sport, football a bureaucratic and violent one; basketball was urban and jazz-like, boxing urban and fatalistically Darwinian.1 Each sport was tied to a distinctive American fantasy (or for boxing, a nightmare). My own first book, which, along with a handful of studies by other scholars, established sport literature as a distinct genre, subscribed to this fundamental idea that sport functioned as cultural myth.2 By 1990, the myth-and-symbol school had come under attack within American studies for a weakness that had become obvious: myth implied a timeless realm, outside of history, separate from ideology. Henry Nash Smith, whose Virgin Land more or less inaugurated and always represented the mythand -symbol school at its best, generously wrote his own mea culpa for a collection of essays by revisionist scholars in 1986, in which he ruefully acknowledged that his book had failed to register how Western myths served ideological purposes.3 American sport historians had little use for myth criticism , and perhaps for that reason they had shied away from cultural history altogether. Allen Guttmann’s contribution to the myth-and-symbol school, A Whole New Ball Game, was much less influential than his application of modernization theory to modern sport in From Ritual to Record; but it was scholars such as Stephen Hardy and Steven Riess who established the principle mode of inquiry: seemingly a conscious rejection of myth criticism, and of grand interpretive theories more generally, in favor of detailed accounts of the rise of American sport in conjunction with the decidedly nonmythic, antipastoral forces of urbanization and industrialization.4 I found this empirical research highly attractive, a counterweight to the anything-goes, selfreferential interpretive freedom ruling my own discipline. Over in the social sciences, American sport sociologists tended to analyze sport as either a distinct social institution or as a “microcosm” of society. An implicit cultural theory arose from these approaches: the idea that sport existed, as the title of a book by sportswriter Robert Boyle put it, as a “mirror” of American life. Racism in football, for example—stereotypes of racial performance, “stacking” at certain positions and exclusion from others, the absence of African Americans in coaching and management roles—mirrored the racism in the larger society. The relationship of the culture of sport to the institutions of American society was mimetic, unmediated. For someone coming from literary studies, such epistemological assumptions had long been discredited. The most obvious alternative for a cultural history of football to both the myth-and-symbol...

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