Abstract This article assesses the significance of the July 29, 1940, interracial exhibition tennis match between Jimmie McDaniel and Don Budge held at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in Harlem. Sponsored by the Wilson Sporting Goods Company, the match was brimming with racial symbolism, pitting Budge, the great white champion, against Jimmie McDaniel, an outstanding Black player from Xavier University in New Orleans, at a time when the United States Lawn Tennis Association refused to sanction contests between Black and white players. The exhibition match was also a short-term but important crack in the seemingly unbreakable commitment to racial segregation in tennis and helped in acclimatizing society to Black and white athletic contests and prompting the ultimate eradication of the color line in Major League Baseball and other sports.
Abstract From 1924 to 1930, Detroit's Holley Carburetor Company sponsored an amateur, and later a professional, soccer team in Detroit and the Midwest Professional Soccer League. The Holleys maintained an impressive roster of regional and international talent who relocated to Detroit to work in the factory and play with the club. The Holleys frequently captured league titles and successfully competed in regional and national tournaments. Despite the club's achievements, it became a casualty of the Great Depression's political and economic battles that rocked Detroit and the nation. A rival communist league developed a competing soccer presence in the city. Conversely, the avowed anti-communist United States Football Association (USFA) leadership barred the communist teams from competing with any USFA team. The Holleys crossed the USFA when it leased its soccer grounds for a communist tournament. The USFA permanently suspended the Holleys for “aiding and abetting the enemy.” This terminated one of Detroit's finest soccer teams and arguably hindered Detroit's soccer potential for decades.
Abstract This article examines the legalization of parimutuel betting at New York racetracks in the context of broader national shifts in public attitudes toward gambling during the Great Depression. It explores the early years of legal racetrack betting in New York and across the country as the sport grew immensely in popularity during the 1930s and 1940s and increasingly became an important source of finance for state governments. The closure of racing by the federal government as a wartime emergency measure proved to be the last gasp of an older reformist morality that disapproved of gambling, as racetrack gambling weathered the ban, and the sport emerged more popular than ever, and with a cemented bond to state governments.
Abstract During the Pakistan military's operation in what was then East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh), the Pakistan cricket team faced intense backlash from the Bengali diaspora on a summer tour of Britain in 1971. This article examines how Bengali activists organized a campaign to halt the tour to protest the Pakistan military's atrocities in their homeland, East Pakistan, sparking a broader debate on the causes of the Bangladesh liberation movement in the British press and beyond. By exploring the dynamics of this protest, the article highlights how sport became an impactful platform for political engagement and social justice. Drawing on hitherto unused archival sources, newspaper accounts, and interviews with key people from the period, it argues that the Bengali community's protest of the Pakistan cricket tour not only amplified the cause of Bangladesh's liberation but also brought international substantiation to their struggle. Furthermore, this article situates this campaign within the broader context of the emerging global human rights and civil society movements against repressive regimes in the “long 1970s,” an era when new forms of political activism challenged oppressive regimes during this period of global transition.
Abstract From humble beginnings, baseball cards have become a distinctive part of US sports history. Yet among the many contributions they have made to that history, one that has been completely overlooked is their influence on fantasy sport. Examining this relationship, first, this article briefly introduces the philosophical, psychological, and neurobiological dynamics of collecting. Second, it surveys the history of baseball cards through the prewar and vintage periods, focusing on how the baseball card industry utilized certain design elements to subtly shift fan allegiance from clubs to individual players and to blur the lines between those players and their cardboard counterparts. Third, it addresses several important developments in the late vintage period and how they contributed to the increasingly widespread perception among fans of players as commodities. In doing so, this article argues that this perception paved the way for the invention of Rotisserie League Baseball, the first fully fledged fantasy sport.
Abstract This article explores how sportfishing became an instrument of the Nazi regime in integrating “Aryans” into the Volksgemeinschaft (racial or national community) through coercive measures and the promise of policies benefitting anglers. Most scholarship on the structure and function of sports in the Third Reich focuses on mass participatory sports or the 1936 Olympic Games. This article shows that leisure activities also played a significant role within the Nazi state and society, as authorities controlled who had access to outdoor spaces and waters, thereby defining who was included and excluded within this Volksgemeinschaft. Restricting access to fishing waters to only “Aryans,” Nazi policies were an important part of the “social death” of German Jews. Although new sportfishing opportunities for “Aryans” fell short of Nazi promises, conquests fed anglers’ desires of the East as a space of unbound recreation. In this sense, even recreational activities such as sportfishing were inextricably tied to larger Nazi policies of exclusion, war, expansion, and potential for plunder.
