New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy ed. by Thomas Aiello (review)

New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy is a collection of thirteen diverse chapters linked by an attempt to explain the unique sporting culture and the broader history of New Orleans from the nineteenth century to the recent past. This work is part of the excellent University of Arkansas Press series Sport, Culture, and Society, which uses the study of sport to illuminate diverse aspects of history, including race, economics, gender, urbanization, and much more.

The book’s editor, Thomas Aiello, is well positioned to oversee the construction of this work. Aiello serves as an associate professor of history and African American studies at Valdosta State University. He is the author of several excellent works, including Bayou Classic: The Grambling-Southern Football Rivalry (Baton Rouge, 2010). The chapters in New Orleans Sports are written by seventeen authors in addition to Aiello. Aiello has assembled a diverse collection of contributors from a wide array of academic disciplines, backgrounds, and career stages. In general, each chapter is written by an author or team of authors who appear well equipped to tackle the topic.

This book makes an important contribution to the scholarship. The historiography on sports in New Orleans has long been dominated by Dale A. Somers’s monograph, The Rise of Sports in New Orleans, 1850–1900 (Baton Rouge, 1972). Aiello and the other authors attempt to “pay homage” to Somers’s work while also expanding on it, primarily by discussing the twentieth century, an era outside Somers’s scope (p. xii). New Orleans Sports is divided into three sections, each focusing on a theme and each consisting of four or five chapters.

The first section in the book, “Victorian Sensibilities,” focuses on “the class dynamic of sports in the city” (p. xvi). In recognition of Somers’s influence, the first chapter is a reprint of Somers’s “A City on Wheels: The Bicycle Era in New Orleans.” Somers explains the transmission of bicycling from the urban middle class of New York to New Orleans and explores the gendered dynamic of one of the few sports in which women competed against men. The next chapter, by Katherine C. Mooney, argues that horse racing in the city had roots in slavery. Randy Roberts writes the book’s third chapter on the longest boxing match in history, a more than six-hour struggle between New Orleans “mulatto” Andy Bowen and “Texas” Jack Burke (p. 36). Aiello writes the final chapter in the section on the complicated class-based “restrictive exclusivity” of tennis in New Orleans (p. 46).

The volume’s second section, “Institutions of the City,” explores how important institutions shaped and were shaped by “the city’s infrastructure and civic development” (p. xviii). This section begins with a chapter by Richard V. McGehee on the influential New Orleans Athletic Club. Chad S. Seifried, Kasey Britt, Samantha Gonzales, and Alexa Webb write the work’s next chapter on Tulane Stadium, which they claim provides an example of the relationship between physical structures and technologies in the creation of a consumer-based sporting culture. Michael S. Martin uses the next chapter to argue that Louisiana senator Russell B. Long helped the National Football League sidestep antitrust laws, when it merged with the American Football League in 1966, in exchange for founding a new team in New Orleans. Robert A. Baade, Victor A. Matheson, and Callan N. Hendershott provide a statistically focused examination of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which concludes, “The role of sports in the economic recovery of the city is dubious aside from serving as a symbol that the city remains vital” (p. 147).

The book’s third and final section, “Race and Respectability,” discusses the powerful racial issues that shaped almost every aspect of sports in New Orleans. Stephen H. Norwood leads the final section with a chapter on the racialized ideology of the...