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F O R E W O R D C. RICHARD KING In his underappreciated ethnography, Cooperstown to Dyersville, Charles Fruehling Springwood maps the shape and significance of collective memory at the close of the twentieth century.1 Contrasting the National Baseball Hall of Fame and its of- ficial account of the sport’s past with the transformation of the location where Field of Dreams2 was filmed into a popular and ephemeral tourist attraction charged with individual recollections of the family and personal connections to the game, he examines a pervasive nostalgia projected through baseball and remembrances of it. Perhaps most importantly, he finds in these sites and in his conversations with tourists, fans, sportswriters, and administrators what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling,3 marked most clearly by a longing to reclaim the past and make claims on the present. Springwood nicely details the ways in which individuals and institutions manage sport’s history, reminding us that who and what is forgotten is as important as who and what is remembered. And here, he directs our attention to the moral economies and cultural politics rarely visible or discussed by sport fans, or sadly even by sport scholars. Of particular interest, Springwood clarifies the differences between enshrining legends in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and redeeming fallen and/or flawed heroes by touring the site for the filming of Field of Dreams, a movie that centers on the metaphysical return of Shoeless Joe Jackson of the infamous Chicago Black Sox scandal. Springwood rightly traces the emergence of this new form of baseball nostalgia to a shift in familial, sexual, and racial structures in the United States and the neo-conservative reaction to them. Since the publication of Cooperstown to Dyersville, the past decade has witnessed a quickening of scholarly interest in the issues taken up by Springwood, particularly his concern with the ways in which the intersections of cultural ideologies and social structures use sport to work through contradictions, manufacture consent , and contain dissent. Significantly, during this period, athletes have emerged in the media, and among the scholars who study it, as privileged sites for the construction and deconstruction of meaning, identity, community, and history.4 While vii questions of race, gender, and power rightly anchor critical engagements with the representation and reception of sport stars, less discussed have been the issues of reputation, redemption, and remembrance. In this context, the present volume is a welcome addition to sport studies precisely because it asks novel questions about familiar themes, shining fresh light on the lives and significance of well-known athletes. Together, the collected essays offer a comparative primer on the fallen athlete and his return in twentieth-century U.S. sports, detailing the circumstances surrounding their falls from grace and their subsequent comebacks. They rightly underscore the prominence of sport, and the lives of great athletes in particular, as the epicenter of moral panics, which simultaneously reinforce prevailing social relations and dominant interpretations and inflict great damage on the character and psyche of the targeted sport stars. The contributors all highlight a simple truth: whether speaking up for the rights of players, advocating for equality, or defending human rights, the perceived transgressions of great athletes have resulted in their demonization and routinely cast them out from those who once claimed to have loved them, taking from them fan support, lucrative endorsements, and often their careers. Significantly, from my reading, a fundamental feature of the shared abjection of the athletes discussed in the subsequent essays is race. The essays detail athletes of color who spoke out, pushed back, stepped out of their place, and took a stand against prevailing social norms. Indeed, race is working in two powerful ways: on the one hand, racialized sport stars become the targets for white resentment in a manner unthinkable for white athletes, who themselves would not think to challenge the status quo, and on the other hand, the problem too often appears to be challenging the racial contract, the forms and norms of white supremacy that give reputation and redemption their force.5 I do not wish to rehearse the essays comprising this collection. They speak with passion and power, displaying uniform quality despite the variations in style, approach , and subject. Whatever their differences, the essays, written in often tragic tones, all take up a central concern, which may not be readily apparent: change. Each of the authors grapple with what accounts for the shifting reputation...

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