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Winning is the Only Thing -- Book Review
Roberts, R. And Olson, J. (1989). Winning is the Only Thing- Sports in America Since
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
The end of World War II brought a number of changes to the United States. Culture, politics, civil rights, technology, gender issues, and certainly by 1949 a new cloud had formed over the world, the U.S./Soviet rivalry known as the Cold War. When one thinks about popular culture in America, one typically does not realize that within the sporting world, too, vast changes took place after 1945. Although baseball was integrated far earlier, after 1945 more Black athletes were allowed into football and basketball teams. This, combined with the era of televised sports, made a huge impact in American society. Sports in America is both a study of the evolution of popular culture in America post-World War II and a way of explaining the tremendous popularity of the entire genre into a "lens through which tens of millions Americans interpreted the significance of their country, their communities, their families, and themselves" (p.xi). Various other changes too place after World War II that dramatically affected the sporting world -- especially in advertising and marketing....
The television, combined with high-priced ads and agreements for sponsors and spokespersons made what was professional sports into something more iconic. Instead of it being part of the culture, in many ways, and for many people, it became the culture. Professional sports were the new religion; economically powerful, socially and culturally endemic, and something that every red-blooded American focused. The text, in fact, says that modern sports are far more about the business of sports, than they are about the team play and recreational aspect of leisure.
The authors, Randy Roberts (Professor of History at Purdue University) and James Olson (Professor of History at Sam Houston State University), have written a number of academic books and journal articles on sports, sporting figures, and popular culture. They are both particularly interested in the way that ostensible leisure activities become far more than leisure in American Post-War popular culture.
Roberts and Olson see 1945 as a watershed year in many respects. The dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan combined with the Marshall Plan in Europe certainly thrust America into global dominance. Once the war was over, though, Americans returned to a new country; technology was king,…
Both authors show their classical trained historical expertise when presenting both insightful and extremely well-researched arguments that, rather than a journalistic polemic, present facts that explore the manner in which big-business, especially in the personification of people like Roone Arledge, both expanded the idea of sports as a pastime and controlled the purse strings to the point that even teams seemed manipulated. Thematically, they show that the emphasis on money and national status may have turned such iconic games as the Olympics into "commercial extravaganzas financed by television and dominated by a show-business ethos" (pp. 209-10). Indeed, the authors' expertise in social history is shown by their analysis of the particular Catholic viewpoint from the early owners of the big football franchises who, until the late 1970s, limited their own franchise movements based on a particular moral and ethical template.
The book was received quite well in the fields of sporting history, social history, and American popular culture studies. One reviewer noted that the only serious limitation in the book was an almost complete lack of the significant changes the sporting world saw from 1960 on in the field of women's sports, feminist thought, and equal participation in the team sports (Adelman, Journal of Sport History, 17, Winter 1990, 390).
For the reader interested in more of an intellectual history of modern sports, the book is a perfect overall introduction. For the reader fascinated by the manner in which the intricacies of popular culture mimic larger cultural trends, the book is a fascinating insight into the way technology, business, and leisure studies merge into a single, unifying trend.
Winning is the Only Thing -- Book Review Roberts, R. And Olson, J. (1989). Winning is the Only Thing- Sports in America Since Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. For the American paradigm, winning World War II caused a domino effect of many changes in culture, politics, technology, sociology, gender, and certainly the way most American's perceived themselves and their relationship with the rest of the world. By 1946 the glow of the
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