Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling by C. Nathan Hatton (review)

Over the course of more than four decades, the Journal of Sport History has witnessed (and facilitated) the explosive growth of sport as a field of serious academic inquiry. That growth, however, has been wildly uneven, with some sports receiving far more scholarly attention than others. Baseball, football, and soccer tend to dominate the field, with the study of other sports often left in the shadows; professional wrestling falls into that latter category of secondary, less-studied sports. Wrestling's problematic current status as "sports entertainment" leaves it as neither fish nor fowl for drama and sports scholars, and serious works on professional wrestling are rare. For wrestling historians such as me, then, the publication of any peer-reviewed monograph helps create optimism for the future of the field. That optimism is buoyed even more when the work is as strong as Nathan Hatton's Thrashing Seasons: Sporting Culture in Manitoba and the Genesis of Prairie Wrestling.

Hatton offers a fine example of the breadth a study of sport can achieve in the hands of a skillful historian. His volume provides a long view of a small area, tracking the story of wrestling in Manitoba across multiple centuries before terminating the study at the cusp of the enormous cultural alterations wrought by the onset of the Great Depression. Wrestling's presence in the area that became Manitoba stretches as far back as the region's written records, giving the sport the unique ability to serve as a cultural lodestone to study developments on the prairie. With wrestling (both amateur and professional) as his foundation, Hatton builds a narrative that interrogates ethnic diversity and conflict, Anglo-Protestant values, masculinity, commercial development, the role of amusements and sport in daily life, and notions of "progress." While limited in geographical scope, the book correctly posits that "many of the themes addressed here have resonance beyond both the wrestling mat itself and the geographical confines of a prairie province" (237).

Hatton's meticulous limning of the role of race and ethnicity in wrestling represents one of the monograph's greatest strengths. In a few instances, however, Hatton might have strengthened those discussions by including additional details. For example, he provides an admirable examination of wrestling among Manitoba's first peoples, but this discussion peters out at the dawn of the twentieth century. Extending the study deeper into the last century might have created opportunities to illuminate the role of wrestling (in both its traditional and European forms) on Indian reserves. Similarly, Hatton scrutinizes the racialized marketing that presented wrestler Reginald Siki as an unlettered and savage "Abyssinian" but fails to note that "Reginald Siki" was actually Missouri-born Reginald Berry. A discussion of Berry's real background would have afforded additional opportunities to discuss both the issues facing and the agency of African American wrestlers. These are, however, minor criticisms of an overwhelmingly excellent monograph.