| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. By Julie Byrne. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. xx, 291 pp. Cloth, $59.50, ISBN 0-231-12748-0. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-231-12749-9.)
In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in Catholic Philadelphia, winter Friday nights belonged to Catholic League high school girls' basketball games. Fans packed the city's Convention Hall by the screaming thousands, and emotions ran so high that officials often looked for nuns to escort them out of the arena, because "nobody would mess with a nun" (p. 24). Many of the city's most talented players fed to tiny Immaculata College, which leapt to sudden prominence in the early 1970s when it captured the newly organized women's national college championship tournament three years in a row. O God of Players details this basketball world, offering a window into an unexplored corner of American women's sports and American Catholicism.	1
Julie Byrne, a scholar of religion, concentrates on the implications the story has for American religious history. While female basketball players rarely mounted open challenges to Catholic teachings, she argues, the physical and emotional pleasures they found in basketball formed a lived experience that differed sharply from conventional Catholicism, in which the "role model for femininity was the virginal and long-suffering Blessed Mother" (p. 5). As a result, Byrne continues, women's basketball highlights the heterogeneity of a religious experience generally portrayed in terms of strict conformity and opens up larger questions not only about American Catholicism but about lived religious experience.	. . .

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