Game Plan: A Social History of Sport in Alberta by Karen L. Wall (review)

In recent years the social study of sport in Canada has reached a new level of maturity. The past two decades in particular have witnessed the publication of a number of scholarly monographs dealing with sport and nation-building; debates involving sexuality, ethnicity, and race; the construction of regional, provincial, and community identities; the history of sporting spectacles such as Olympic Games; and the concomitant growth of big-time capitalist sporting practice. Important work has been done as well on individual sports such as hockey, baseball, football, and lacrosse. Nevertheless, popular understanding of our sporting history remains shaped largely by representations in the media and in sports heritage centres and halls of fame, which tend to focus upon the elite athlete, performance excellence, and “up close and personal” human interest stories, rather than sport as a cultural and economic process and a contested space where class, ethnicity, gender, and other social conflicts and identities are mediated and constructed. As we rapidly approach Canada’s upcoming sesquicentennial celebration, therefore, it is important to consider how historians might contribute to a wider and more nuanced public understanding of sport’s role in shaping Canada’s past and present.

Karen Wall’s social history of sport in Alberta provides an important illustration of how historians working in association with the museum and heritage communities can at once speak to scholarly concerns and wider public audiences. Innovative in approach and comprehensive in scope, the book sweeps across time and space, from Indigenous games to contemporary metropolitan sporting activities, from individual to team sports, from small-town to “world class” events, and across the calendar from summer to winter sports. In the process it privileges no particular sport or participant: we are treated to careful descriptions and analysis of everything from professional hockey to rodeo and wrestling. At the same time, what makes Wall’s study most compelling is not its encyclopedic sweep, but its theoretical and analytical sophistication.

The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. It begins with the cultural imaginings associated with sport, sport’s capacity to help shape civic identities, and its ability to mobilize widespread involvement and support. After a number of chapters that deal with the development of sport over time, it turns ultimately to a discussion of several themes and issues. The last section of the book, “The Social Body,” is arguably the most engaging. It includes five chapters addressing sport as contested terrain, outlining the tensions between forces of control and resistance and, within that, the importance of human agency in shaping sporting culture. This part of the book begins with a discussion of proscriptive disciplines applied to the individual and social bodies in the name of health, beauty and fitness, and the gradual incorporation into the social body of those whose imagined “otherness” – whether on the ground of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or disability – had marginalized them. Gender issues are explored in two chapters and in innovative ways. Wall addresses the “wild” and “domesticated” versions of gendered identities that developed in the cowboy West, along with the gendered “outlaws” who worked to dismantle fences that surrounded public behaviours considered “inappropriate,” and who challenged archetypical images of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexual hegemony. From there the discussion centres upon aggression, violence, and high-risk behaviour in sport and the ways these phenomena are connected to the mass media, the marketing and promotion of capitalist sport, and the mega event.

Obviously, a book that sweeps across the universe of sporting practices and shifting discourses associated with sport’s development at all levels and over time is an immense organizational and analytical challenge. If at times the threads of the analysis seem to fray a bit, that is to be expected in a work as ambitious as this. In the end, Game Plan is a highly readable, provocative, and comprehensive work, which includes all of those people and events that shaped the province’s...