Memory, Nostalgia, and the Hearts of (Mostly Male) Sports Fans

review essay by Geoffrey S. Smith, Department of History, Queen’s University, Kingston,
Ontario. Sociology of Sport (2004, No. 2), 230-237.

Books reviewed:

Brent P. Kelley, The San Francisco Seals, 1946-1957: Interviews With 25 Former Baseballers
(Macfarland, 2002)
Martin S. Jacobs, Before They Were Champions: The San Francisco 49ers’ 1958 Season, 2002.
Victor Debs, Jr. “That Was Part of Baseball Then”: Interviews With 24 Major League Players, Coaches, and Managers (Macfarland, 2002).
Tim Wolter, POW Baseball in World War II: The National Pastime Behind Barbed Wire
(Macfarland, 2002)
Thad Williamson, More Than a Game: Why North Carolina Basketball Means So Much to So
Many (Economic Affairs Bureau, 2001).

Reading this collection leads to uncomfortable self-examination by a reviewer who has
played, coached, watched his kids play and compete, and, above all, rooted for the home team--
at times obsessively. These volumes provide perspectives on sport before and after it became a
megabusiness, perspectives that reveal a problematic prologue to the values of the consumer
emporium that now frame sport at all levels. The books take us back to an earlier era–when
Michael was Mike; when fans looked in newspapers for scores and standings rather than arrests,
paternity suits, and drug disqualifications; when media did not deem private lives news; and
when most professional athletes were working stiffs like the rest of us. Throughout these
volumes one encounters varied constructions of sport as the roar of the greasepaint and the smell
of the crowd. For the most part, sport and competition are good things, until one checks the
underside and reads between the lines....

[discussion of the four other books]

Although it’s a long way from Nazi Germany to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the title of
Thad Williamson’s book, More Than a Game, is an apt description...for the volumes under
assessment here. For, like his colleagues, Williamson concerns himself with discovering the
reasons why sport, in this case University of North Carolina basketball, generates the amazing
devotion it does. This question, which provides a common theme of inquiry for the reviewer and
sports sociologists everywhere, is much with us these days, as Canadians and Americans appear
to spend far more time rooting for, and worrying about, their teams than thinking about
imperative domestic and international issues. Part of the answer may lie in the power of false
consciousness, as Marxists suggest, or feelings of cynicism and helplessness that many citizens
now experience when thinking about government and the big global questions. In any event, the
primacy of sport in contemporary culture underlies sport’s popularity as media spectacle over the last quarter-century.

Williamson demonstrates that basketball at North Carolina is, for thousands, both a way
of life and a religion. Older values of the producer culture dominate the ambience of Tar Heel
hoops, especially since Dean Smith became coach in 1961. The son of a UNC historian,
Williamson grew up enveloped in all of this splendor. Along the way, like Marc Jacobs with the
49ers, he amassed scrapbooks, journals, photographs, and other memorabilia with which he
reconstructs his accounts. On one level, his book is a journal of wonderment–the great players,
big games, and far too many late-round NCAA tournament defeats. The author, however, moves
beyond the anecdotal as he seeks to detect empirical meaning in the fealty accorded the team. In
addition to his own recollection of the 300 or so people who, in the last 40 years, played,
coached, and assisted with the basketball program, he also relies on the more than 600 people
who completed his survey concerning their feelings about the UNC basketball program as a
source of information.

Williamson’s survey and a fan-diaries project he conducted allow him to assess a broad
cross-section of Tar Heel supporters, including women and minorities, groups often missing
from fan-driven sports literature. On one level he finds that UNC basketball provides a key sense
of community–spatial, temporal, and imagined–otherwise lacking in his respondents’ lives. For
students, residents of Chapel Hill, and North Carolina generally–especially if they had left the
region–loyalty became a way of making “a major statement about who you are, and one that will
likely influence whom you choose as friends” (p.147). He also understands that a major reason
for the fierceness of UNC loyalty is the schools propinquity to archrivals Duke and NC State.
Duke has had more NCAA tourney success than the Tar Heels over the last two decades, and
Williamson includes a generous chapter that finds many similarities between rooters for the
respective schools.

Most important, Williamson takes his distance from uncritical homage. On one hand he
finds people whose explanation of support include the traditional values Americans treasure,
especially in an era of consumerism and media hype amok. UNC supporters, noting the place of
basketball within the university’s academic mission, as well as Coach Smith’s quiet and effective
leadership, used words like “family,” “character,” “integrity,” “loyalty,” “perseverance,”
“sacrifice,” and “self-control” to praise UNC basketball. Using Tar Heel basketball Internet
websites, they come together, not just at games, or in sports bars, but all year long in virtual
communities united by common devotion, to analyze, assess, suggest, and–often after Dean
Smith’s departure in 1998–carp.

Here Williamson finds room to quarrel with the superfans who fault university sports
programs for not winning enough, or at the right times. No matter who they are (and the author
looks right in the mirror on this one) fans lack crucial information about the dynamics of team
behavior and performance. More important, the author emphasizes, winning is not the only thing,
and fans who think it is and let this obsession control their lives reflect values of the consumer
culture that show up as boorishness and anger that may affect other parts of their lives.
Williamson acknowledges the existence of what Joe Queenan terms the “tragic, inner life,” of
many contemporary superfans, and his conclusions fit with recent work done on masculine sport
pathology by feminist scholars.

Fans are now, more than ever, part of the game. They hold up signs, wave banners, clown
behind TV interviews, and even charge onto fields to attack umpires and opposing players. This
crudeness is not new, but it is now a more important component of sport. It forces us to look
back to earlier times to identify roots of the current problem. Then, winning was important, but it
was not the sole item on the sports agenda. Then, the business of sport was part of the game but
far less than the whole. Then, we still took some distance from sport and might imagine, even
fantasize, about the source of our pleasure. Then, we had less chance to rage at ridiculously high-
paid (and often uncivil) stars and more chance to accept mediocrity and failure on the field.
Today, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, too many of us have climbed through the looking glass of
consumerism and become part of the spectacle. Given the power of corporate sport, it will be
difficult to return.