Untitled [Matthew Barlow on Sport in Canada: a History]

Don Morrow, Kevin Wamsley. Sport in Canada: A History. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005. x + 318 pp. $44.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-19-541996-2. Reviewed by Matthew Barlow Published on H-Canada (April, 2006) Perhaps it was ftting that within a week after would seem to me that sport historians must take receiving this book for review from H-Canada I up Gruneau's challenge in order to properly un‐ was cross-checked by an opposing defenseman derstand sport and culture. This makes inherent while standing in front of the other team's goal, sense, I would argue, as sport is a manifestation trying to screen the goalie. As I spent the next of culture, and sport's meanings come out of the three weeks lying on the hardwood foor of my dialectic between sport, culture, and the actors study recuperating my sprained back and reflect‐ who participate in, comment upon, and view ing upon the myriad injuries I have accumulated sport. over the years playing hockey, football, and soc‐ It is this dialectic that Don Morrow, the dean cer, I read this book, and spent a lot of time re‐ of Canadian sport historians, and Kevin B. Wams‐ flecting on the sections dealing with the body and ley, both of the University of Western Ontario, ex‐ the discipline and training required to participate amine in their new undergraduate textbook Sport and excel in sport. in Canada: A History. Quite simply, this is an ex‐ To my mind, the focus on the body that has cellent book, and one that can be read by both un‐ become vogue amongst sport historians in recent dergraduates and specialists in the feld with years best reflects the promise of the burgeoning equal excitement. Morrow and Wamsley's writing field of sport history. Sport historians have prob‐ is lively and engaging, even if it veers into sports lematized the body and the attendant discipline journalism at times. Moreover, the authors make the athlete's body requires in a manner that sug‐ a special effort to embed sport and leisure, and its gests we are fnally heeding the 1983 call of meanings and manifestations, into the culture Richard Gruneau to view sport as a cultural text. from which they arise. For example, Morrow and [1] While Gruneau did not have such concepts as Wamsley spend a good deal of time situating the gender and the body in mind when he made this leisure forms of the French coureurs de bois in connection--he was more focused on class--it the rough-and-tumble world of the fur trade fron‐ H-Net Reviews tier. These leisure activities, which do not con‐ naturally from Scott's appearance, the media at‐ form to our modern visions of sport, nonetheless tention to her appearance, and the sport of fgure served the same purpose, as a means of escape skating itself, which combines the precision and and relaxation from the physical, taxing, and oc‐ beauty of dance with the athletic skills of the gym‐ casionally violent work these men engaged in nast. Yet more than anyone else, Barbara Ann during the day, and that, moreover, these leisure Scott was the media's vehicle for a re-entrench‐ forms arose out of these forms of work. ment (or new wave) of traditionalism that encour‐ But while Morrow and Wamsley do weave aged female domesticity at the expense of compet‐ sport and leisure quite skilfully into the landscape itive involvement" in the aftermath of World War of Canadian culture since the pre-contact aborigi‐ II (p. 145). Also of note is the fact that Scott's shop‐ nal era, they are also quite adept at not lapsing ping sprees in Paris garnered more attention from into banal Canadian mythology, in particular with the Canadian media than did her three consecu‐ hockey. Despite my own bias towards this sport as tive Lou Marsh Trophies as the Canadian athlete both a player and an historian, in popular culture of the year in 1946-48. Morrow and Wamsley ar‐ hockey too often gets reduced to banalities that gue that this served to keep Scott's femininity equate it with Canada (think of t-shirts, bumper "carefully contrived.... It kept her an athlete in dis‐ stickers, and the like which declare that "Canada guise. Barely mentioned were her qualities of sac‐ is Hockey"), or it is used to explain the differences rifice, tenacity, determination, her lonely quest in culture between Canada and other nations, for athletic excellence through thousands of prac‐ most noticeably the United States.[2] Morrow and tice hours, a real person working towards an ad‐ Wamsley, however, de-privilege hockey in the mirable human achievement" (p. 147). This pub‐ narratives of Canadian sport history and instead lic/private dichotomy is central to their analysis of focus on athletes such as the fgure skaters Louis Scott, and, to a lesser extent, the three male ath‐ Rubinstein and Barbara Ann Scott, or the strong‐ letes they focus on (the great oarsman Ned Han‐ man Louis Cyr, or sports such as baseball and ley, fgure skater Rubenstein, and Cyr), and is a lacrosse and their development in Canada. All of useful tool for exploring the sexualized images this is not to say that hockey is ignored, but I and bodies of elite athletes, especially women, would suggest that this more nuanced approach both historically and in contemporary society (for allows for Morrow and Wamsley to examine example, think of the images of the Russian tennis sport, culture, and myth in Canada in a much players Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova). more fuid manner, and to analyze the place of Yet, it is precisely this layered and subtle gen‐ sport absent the simple banalities. dered analysis of Scott and her career that make Morrow and Wamsley's insistence on referring to Indeed, it is in this kind of approach to the her as "Barbara Ann" throughout their discussion place and meaning of sport and athletes in culture all the more frustrating. None of the male athletes that Morrow and Wamsley are most successful, as discussed in Sport in Canada are referred to by they effectively fesh out questions of gender, eth‐ their frst name, a practice which serves to infan‐ nicity, and class. Their discussion of gender, espe‐ talize and patronize not just the female athlete, cially as it related to Cyr and Scott, is particularly but her accomplishments as well. well developed. In the case of Scott, they are par‐ ticularly adept in their focus on her gender and This brings me to my major quibbles with sexuality as both an amateur and professional fg‐ Sport in History. Some of these are no doubt at‐ ure skater. In discussing Scott's "doll-like image," tributable to the fact that this book was designed Wamsley and Morrow write that it "flowed almost as an undergrad textbook, as it falls prey to some of the problems of this genre. The most noticeable 2 H-Net Reviews is an attempt to be all things to all people, which mains that it is the larger than the "gigantic" Sky‐ can lead to a rather scattershot and journalistic Dome. approach in spots. For example, in the discussion In the same vein, Atlantic Canada, the of baseball in Canada during the twentieth centu‐ Prairies, and British Columbia (to say nothing of ry, Morrow and Wamsley's discussion of the feats the North) are largely absent from the discussion of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the old Internation‐ and analysis of sport in Canada. To some extent, al League tends towards a simple descriptive re‐ this can be expected, as modern sport (i.e., orga‐ counting of the team's pennants and home runs. nized, rule-bound sport) radiated out from Mon‐ Similarly, in discussing the death in 2004 of the treal, and later, Toronto, across Canada. However, Montreal Expos, Canada's frst major league base‐ sport was also central to the development of ball club, they write the following: "The major Canadian culture and society across the entirety reason was the ever-present problem in most of the nation, as Colin Howell has ably demon‐ Canadian professional sport enterprises--too strated with baseball in the Maritimes [3]. Or, to small a population base to support big league take the case of box lacrosse, the sport underwent sporting franchises consistently" (p. 124). While a boom in the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Is‐ this may have been the case with the decamp‐ land in British Columbia throughout the twentieth ment of the Quebec Nordiques to Denver or the century. Indeed, when I was growing up in Van‐ Winnipeg Jets to Phoenix (or, for that matter, the couver in the 1980s and early 1990s, much atten‐ move of the Hartford Whalers to Raleigh, North tion was focused on the feats of the New Westmin‐ Carolina), it was not the case with the Expos. Mon‐ ster Salmonbellies, Burnaby Lakers, and Vancou‐ treal, according to the 2001 census, is a metropoli‐ ver Burrards in their attempts to capture the na‐ tan area of 3.38 million, which makes it a larger tional box lacrosse championship. Today, nearly urban center than most "large" American centres 150 years after the decline of feld lacrosse as a such as Boston, Miami, Denver, and, indeed, major sport in central Canada, box lacrosse re‐ Washington, the city to which the Expos moved. mains a popular sport on the West Coast, despite Sport in Canada also suffers from an Ontario- the failure of the new National Lacrosse League's centric approach to the history of sport in Canada.

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