Sports in American Life: A History (review)

This book is a strike. An experienced academic who has authored books on sports, gambling, small towns, and national culture, Richard Davies provides us with a well-written, interesting, and comprehensive view of sports in American life. Gracefully joining well-chosen analytic themes and illustrative biographies and portraits of exceptional teams, Davies puts scholarship and art on the same team. He does this while offering a narrative and an explanation why and how sports came to occupy such a central place in contemporary American experience.

Sports in American Life does not saunter into the history of leisure, nor does it grandstand by claiming to be a study of all sports. It does not make a single constricted argument or propose an orthodox ideology, such as sports is a means of social control, a form of mass capitalism, or a tool of nationalism. Instead, Davies, who betrays his own enthusiasm for sports with page after page of energetic writing, accepts the rich role of sports in American life and democratic society. Davies finds excitement in the games themselves and stands in awe before the lives of athletic heroes. Yet, critically observant, he sees sports stealing souls, energies, money, and especially university direction and public attention. He underlines the pathetic, self-interested, and coarse motives met on and off the sporting field. He delineates sports as an arena of accomplishment and tragedy, an architect of local and national identities and communities, and nothing less than a definer of historical moments and epochs.

Sports in American Life focuses principally on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when modern sports were developed and organized, spiritualized, propagated and commercialized. After introductory chapters on games the colonists played and the emergence of early American sports—especially horse racing, boat racing, prizefighting, and the most American game of all, baseball—Davies takes up the formation of college football. He next treats sports' place mass, national and popular society. In subsequent sections, he shows sports in the service of individual body development; the early participation of women in sports; the articulation of scholastic competition; and the formation of professional national baseball, which produces national heroes and betting scandals. Davies goes on to depict sports on campus (particularly the two "biggies," football and basketball); and shows sports as the great entertainers and comforters during the Depression through nationally-famous athletes like golfer Babe Zacharias, the prize-fighter Joe Lewis, and race horse Seabisuit.

In concluding chapters, Davies takes up issues inherent in sports and their institutionalization, democratization, and commercialization. The issue of race tops Davies's agenda of profound problems with which sports had to grapple, and has largely overcome. The movement for gender equality and its success also receives additional contemporary attention, with Mia Hamm celebrating championship in world soccer. But at the same time, evil is not evicted from the garden. The tangle of serpent and tree, and money and sports, involves considerations about gambling, television rights, players' pay, expanded leagues, the dominance of college sports on campuses, town and public needs for professional teams for economic development, and competition among the sports for audiences.

Beyond the constant temptations and insidious corruption engendered by money, which, like boxing itself, has sent more than one sport crashing to the canvas, national pride and politics also intermittently make the matter of a game a question of state. Nevertheless, with problems as broad and complex as society as a whole, sports still deliver extraordinary and unambiguous victories—ones that can be decisively counted and safely enjoyed. Individuals overcome all odds; teams and programs, women and blacks, are vindicated; traditions of rivalry and unforgettable victories are recorded for the moment and for posterity.

Although I wish at one point Davies would have directly taken up the issue of sports in mass society as a replacement for myth and ritual, heroism and sainthood, war and life, Davies lets us see American society in the microcosm of its sports, and it gives us something to cheer for.