sla review: jay, more than just a game

More Than Just a Game: Sports in American Life Since 1945

Reviewed by Scott A. Winkler, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

OCTOBER 20, 2004 archive

For most of us with a vested interest in sports literature, our involvement grew out of a personal connection to sport that began in childhood-rooting for our heroes, celebrating victories (or forever waiting for next year, as was my case with the Brewers and Packers teams I followed in the 1970s and 80s), or participating ourselves, formally or informally, in the games we love. But somewhere along the way, at some point when we began to realize that our critical faculties could take us at least as far as our legs could run or our arms might throw, we began to realize that the influence of sport upon us possesses another dimension-we realized that our heroes, our teams, and our acts were both lenses and mirrors that could help us critically understand the culture in which we live. That is why we read, write, and teach about sport, and that is why we have fine books like More Than Just a Game: Sports in American Life Since 1945 by Kathryn Jay of Barnard College, Columbia University.

That other dimension is what Ms. Jay so skillfully examines. Her book’s seven chapters trace the growth and development of sport in the post-World War II era, and though this treatment often privileges sport at the professional level, Ms. Jay is also careful to include discussions of the significance of amateur sports (especially the Olympics) and participatory sports (including an especially enlightening section on bowling in the 1950s-did you know, for example, that in the 1950s a new fashion industry emerged “to create ‘bowling attire’ for women, further marking the lanes as a place where women could be physical without worrying that they would seem unfeminine”(65)?).

But the privileging of professional sport is done with good reason, for it is in that arena where we may most transparently observe the true operations placed under Ms. Jay’s critical microscope. Her book seeks to do far more than present a pithy history (though on this level alone, it is a worthwhile read). In More Than Just a Game, Ms. Jay seeks to explore how sport, in degrees that are at times highly symbolic and at times absolutely explicit, becomes a site for the circulation of issues significant to the discourses of American culture. In the book’s introduction, she very succinctly prepares us for the task she will perform, stating that “in the United States, sports are rarely just sports…[that] important issues of race, gender, class, and national identity have been worked out on the country’s sporting fields, as athletes and teams became symbols of the larger social forces transforming American society”(4).

Ms. Jay, in a highly accessible prose style, convincingly links sport and societal transformation. Each chapter deals with a specific historical period, and within each chapter, Ms. Jay identifies dominant social and cultural discourses as they played out in the arena of sports. What is especially impressive is that she generally avoids making judgments or sweeping proclamations about the issues of race, gender, class, and national identity. Instead, she presents historical information in a manner that enables readers to identify the very real struggles that have always taken place over just who will authoritatively give voice to what it means to be a proper American-against the backdrop of the tumultuous 1960s, for example, we see sports heroes who embodied clean-cut masculinity; we find minority athletes whose involvement in sport seems to anticipate progress toward greater racial understanding at the same time their involvement reflects the historically inferior place reserved for them at the American table; and we see sport exalt the glory of victory at the same time it reveals what are, for many, the unacceptable price that victory extracts.

And it is that conflict, that discourse-forever present, forever evolving, and always placed at the forefront of More Than Just a Game-that make this book such a valuable contribution to the canon of sport literature. It will, I am certain, prove to be a useful text not only to the general reader, but also (and perhaps especially) to students and teachers of American culture and history, persons who will certainly come to realize that “sports aren’t perfect, but then, neither are we”(242).

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