| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 33.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Colorado: A Sports History. By James Whiteside. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1999. xvi + 494 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index. $34.95.)

In the first line of the book the writer asks, "Why write a sports history of Colorado?" The answer that follows—"Why not?"—is not particularly reassuring to the reader hoping to encounter a work of some theoretical or interpretive significance. The main rationale for the study seems to be that a major sports newspaper dubbed Denver as the foremost sports city in the nation and that it has four major league sports teams. Whiteside, however, does manage to read into the Colorado sports story some larger social and historical meaning. Building upon Allen Guttmann's theory that the evolution from play to professional sports parallels the evolution of societies toward more bureaucratic and institutional complexity, the author posits three overlapping categories of sport: as life and work, as personal play and recreation, and as business. More than a history of legendary athletes and big games, "sports history is about business, politics, class, race, gender, mores, and values" (p.xiii). Whiteside does in fact draw upon these perspectives to enrich his narrative, but for seven of the book's ten chapters, he falls into a pattern of recounting the separate histories of the various sports that could just as well appear in a sports history of, say, Ohio. . . .

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