For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (review)

In the last twenty years, the historiography of sport in Canada has been dominated by Alan Metcalfe's work on nineteenth-century organized sport and Bruce Kidd's examination of sport and physical activity in the interwar years. Nancy Bouchier's For the Love ofthe Game is an excellent extension of the former and an important chronological precursor to the latter. In exploring the ideological realities of amateurism in small-town nineteenth-century Ontario, Bouchier examines male athletes in three sports - cricket, baseball, and lacrosse - played during civic holiday celebrations in two local settings (Woodstock and Ingersoll) between 1838 and 1895. Through the 'amateur code' and its associated values, social reformers sought to address the perceived problems of feminization, crime, and delinquency among male youth.

Associated as it was with respectable English society, cricket both lacked broad participant appeal and offered little opportunity for social reformers. By the mid-1860s baseball was the most popular summer sport in Ontario. But as civic boosterism became an increasingly important component of local sport, the effectiveness of amateur ideology was undermined. Baseball's turn to a commercial spectacle in the 1870s effectively ended Woodstock's and Ingersoll's ability to compete with larger centres such as London, Guelph, and Toronto. The booming popularity of lacrosse between 1870 and 1890 owes much to its value to civic boosters and social reformers. In both Ingersoll and Woodstock, 'lacrosse arrived in town as the first wave of local baseball mania floundered ... That lacrosse had none of the stigma associated with cricket helped its appeal to urban boosters and sport reformers alike.'

Lacrosse and other holiday sporting events were organized by the local amateur athletic associations (AAAs), formed in Woodstock in 1884 and in Ingersoll five years later. These associations connected the towns to the reform currents that swept across Canada in the late nineteenth century. In sport, this agenda was championed by the Montreal AAA, founded in 1881. The predominantly white, Protestant middle-class men who ran these clubs 'believed that they could lead local male youth to develop respectable values that would help them along life's journey and that the success of local lacrosse teams would be the town's success as well.' The reality of the amateur code was that it was as exclusionary as it was prescriptive and offered social uplift to only a segment of society. However, the 'town sanctioning of amateur sport clubs for the running of local civic holiday events is an important key to how the amateur movement diffused throughout urban Canada.'

The AAA planning of civic holiday celebrations had unintended consequences. While 'local amateur athletics were intended to keep holiday events locally focused, AAA-run holiday games in Ingersoll and Woodstock relegated local people to the spectator stands and created a tremendous gap between townspeople and amateur athletes.' As a distinctly male realm celebrating codified sports, amateurism precluded women's participation while many traditional events (e.g., slippery pigs, greased poles) were eliminated from the program. Despite the AAAs' influence, Bouchier claims that 'one can see reform ideas falling quite short of the mark.' As sporting events became commercial ventures, a number of 'oppositional' practices crept in - including rowdiness (both on the field and off), drinking, betting, and game-fixing.

Bouchier addresses issues of class, gender, and community formation. However - from a gender perspective, for example - she goes no further than to suggest that organized sport was male and that female participation was limited to the 'private sphere' (e.g., preparing food for cricket banquets). While true, it is an insight that has been made elsewhere. Indeed, this book is in many ways a fleshed-out version of Bouchier's important 1994 contribution. Her demographic portrait of AAA executives and their ideological motivations, as well as the lived negotiation between hegemonic ideal and local practice, are all components of this earlier article. Despite this...