The notion that there are lessons to be learned through playing sports is as old as athletics themselves. Athletes, coaches and physical educators have long touted their chosen sports, whether individual or team-oriented, as holding wisdom. Citizenship, leadership, financial and business success, life happiness and manliness are just some of the most popular examples. As with any subject, though, the lessons learned through sports are influenced by each player’s perspectives, their ambitions and, perhaps most important of all, their level of open-mindedness.
The lessons learned through sports history, it turns out, are no different. There is one crucial addition, though. Our understanding of sports history is immeasurably enriched by learning about the complexities of the lives and times of the individuals who played, organized, covered and watched these games.
As a historian and educator, I approach sports history as the ongoing story of how sports and American history — in all its intricacies — converge. People are drawn to history and sports in part because both are filled with stories, often powerful ones. Stories are driven by people. And the most compelling stories — which do not always have happy endings (in fact, they often do not) — consist of people who are multi-faceted. The sports figures that my students and I encounter are alternately embattled, persistent, ambitious, indecisive, unwise, defeated, triumphant, generous and self-involved, among other things. In other words, for all the successes and seemingly super-human abilities and feats of people in sports — the very reasons so many of us admire them — they are, like us, human. And like us, sports figures have interests beyond sports. They also struggle to make sense of an unceasingly complicated world and strive to find their place in it. The limelight as well as the spoils and pressures of fame perplex their efforts in ways most of us can only imagine.
Any serious study of sport must go beyond highlight reels. Conversations about landmark “firsts” must grapple with why trailblazers like Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, Charlie Sifford and Althea Gibson, the subject of my book, emerged when they did. Doing so allows us to see that all athletes’ lives and careers are impacted by events and histories beyond sports that shape not only their opportunities but also how they are perceived and what they symbolize. Discussions about Billie Jean King and the famed Battle of the Sexes are incomplete if Bobby Riggs is treated simply as a harmless, clowning blowhard, a relic of a distant past. We can talk about Johnny Unitas as the heroic star of the 1958 NFL Championship Game, which raised the popularity of football and inspired countless American boys to want to play the sport. That conversation, though, should also address the publicity that a physically ravaged Unitas received at the end of his life, as he confronted the league over disability matters and pensions for retired players. Seabiscuit was a valiant horse, winning races against better-regarded eastern thoroughbreds during the Great Depression. Yet we cannot forget that he was also an avatar for millions of Americans who felt overlooked because of their origins and class status as millions of people feel today.
“Show me a hero and I’ll show you a tragedy,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald. That observation applies to sports heroes, too. Sports history is more than trivia, and it is more than ever-smiling, one-dimensional icons hoisting trophies. Whether it is sports history or any other field of history, we gloss over and ignore the hard and inconvenient truths at our own — and our students’ — peril.
