| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sports Matters: Race, Recreation, and Culture. Ed. by John Bloom and Michael Nevin Willard. (New York: New York University Press, 2002. viii, 368 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8147-9881-0. Paper, $18.50, ISBN 0-8147-9882-9.)
The notion that American sports reflect American culture is often repeated, sometimes for good reason. Witness Sports Matters, an eclectic, engaging collection of fifteen essays, which demonstrates that through sports we might learn something important about the United States and its people, historically and contemporaneously. Organized into three sections—the early twentieth century to the civil rights movement to the post–Cold War era—the book avoids facile generalizations and instead examines its subjects "from specific locations and concrete circumstances" (p. 4). This is altogether appropriate, since rigorous cultural criticism must be rooted in the particular.	1
What differentiates Sports Matters from other recent academic anthologies about sports—such as Geneviève Rail's Sport and Postmodern Times (1998), Randy Martin and Toby Miller's SportCult (1999), and Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald's Reading Sport (2000)—is its focus on race and ethnicity. To its credit, Sports Matters moves well beyond a simplistic black/white conception of these subjects. In addition to several essays that focus on different African American topics, Sports Matters includes essays about the Hawaiian surfer Duke Kahanamoku, Japanese Americans and baseball, Mexican Americans and baseball, whiteness and skiing, representations of Native American athletes, the Mexican American prizefighter Oscar De La Hoya, and the multiracial golfing phenomenon, Tiger Woods.	. . .

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