the athletic crusade
Reviewed by Robert S. Brown
JUNE 13, 2007 archive
With the innovations in communication technology, the integration of regional economies, and the breaking down of traditional geopolitical barriers, we clearly are living in an age of globalization. We are also witness to the backlash against this globalization, as seen through protests at recent G8 summits and, some might argue, the Middle East tensions with the Western World.
Gerald Gems' The Athletic Crusade is an examination of one facet of the globalization process and the various reactions to it. Gems examines the spread of American sport in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into nations such as China, Japan, Hawaii, Cuba and Puerto Rico. These efforts were normally led by religious organizations, especially the YMCA, but Gems also reveals the involvement of the American government and military as both enablers and enforcers of this sport imperialism.
From one perspective, the efforts to spread American sports globally were part of a noble cause. Religious leaders, with the zeal of doing good work, saw sport as a way to attract native peoples while teaching a new morality. Political leaders saw sport as a path towards education and civility. Business leaders, such as Major League Baseball, argued for sport as a method of opening diplomatic doors and building bridges, though a truer motive might have been increasing the popularity of their sports and, hopefully, equipment and merchandise sales as well.
Gems, however, provides thoroughly documented research into the negative side effects of these globalization efforts. American sports are used to crush indigenous cultures, create caste systems amongst the locals, and establish American control over local government, education, and religious institutions. Gems details how sport became just another tool for invading and oppressing foreign lands as part of the vision of manifest destiny.
What I found most interesting in Gem's book were the various reactions to imperialism. For example, while China, especially with the rise of communism after WWII, rejected American sport, in Japan, nationalist efforts used sport to resist Western imperialism and take back their culture. Cuba used the same sports intended to pacify them to challenge the Western world. Gems is careful to examine each nation and its own experiences, and not lump the globe together in a one effort/one reaction model.
The study of sport imperialism is not new. To name just a couple of examples, Dick Crepeau's 1982 Journal of Popular Culture essay "Pearl Harbor: A Failure of Baseball" provides insight into the American media's reporting of baseball's "invasions" of Japan, while Brian Stoddart's "Sport, Cultural Imperialism, and the Colonial Response in the British Empire" published in Comparative Studies in Society and History in 1988 examines the key role played by sport in holding onto the British Empire. Gems, however, provides the largest and most detailed examination of American involvement in this process, and the organization of his book readily allows for nation by nation comparisons of imperialist techniques and reactions. The book is of obvious interest to sport scholars, but also those whose interests include sociology, politics, and military history.
Gems, Gerald R. The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 233pp.
Copyright © 2007 by Robert S. Brown.