A History of American Sports in 100 Objects by Cait Murphy (review)

All sports arenas and stadiums across the United States have the ubiquitous shops and stalls selling jerseys, merchandise, and objects ranging from collectables and memorabilia to items that can be used in cars, kitchens, and offices. These ventures in themselves represent significant turnover for sports franchises and teams. Objects matter and sports objects even more so to fans and consumers of sport. More recently, sports historians have considered the relationship between art, design, fashion, and sport history. Using objects to explain social and cultural histories, this approach has been extended to exploring cities, countries, famous authors, wars, and individual sports, including baseball and soccer. Cait Murphy does this in her A History of American Sports in 100 Objects.

Murphy sets out to highlight sporting objects rather than legends and, therefore, does not necessarily cover the greatest sports events, performances, or athletes. Murphy included objects rather than images, although she does include a painting and a picture of a brain scan. She acknowledges that football, baseball, and basketball receive the most coverage due to their popularity in American sporting history. Yet their combined coverage is less than half of the images used in the text. Over thirty different sports are represented in the selection, and a third of the objects are from before 1950. Murphy notes the subjective nature in the selection of the objects, but this is also a strength of the publication. We get to enjoy her selection of a hundred sports objects. The objects are discussed chronologically with accessible explanations and text, despite the use of clichés in some of the entries.

The first object is a statue of a chunky player from 1100, while the last objects discussed are the 2016 Special Olympics medals. A range of objects are included in the publication in addition to the obvious balls, bats, gloves, and cleats, including bricks, buildings, clothes, magazines, radios, rules, and soil, among others. One of the strengths of the collection is that Murphy weaves in fascinating stories in her explanation of each of the objects, and this makes for enjoyable and informative reading. Each of the entries has at least one reference in the case of the Record of Payment for the First Professional Football Player from 1892 to over thirty in the case of Jesse Owens's baton from the 1936 relay. This means coverage of each of the objects is understandably uneven. Murphy consults a range of sources from scholarly to more popular publications. She makes extensive use of online sources, too, and engages in a range of important scholarly themes, including issues of gender, race, civil rights, class, amateurism, professionalism, technology, and nationalism.

Murphy credits where many of the images of the objects originate from, but a little more information on where many of the items are physically located would have been useful. The photos are of varying quality, and all are black and white. Acknowledging the additional costs color photos would have incurred, color pictures would have enhanced the publication. While the publication is not scholarly in the strict academic sense, it will be of use to students in introductory sports studies courses in history, sociology, management, and psychology. Scholars could use this as a valuable reference book, too. Murphy is commended for a very engaging and useful publication that potentially opens up further avenues for sports historians to consider the role of sport, objects, and memory more generally.