This semester I have the pleasure of teaching HIS 330, Sports in America, an upper-level History elective. I love to teach this course, because each time I teach it I learn so much more about American History.
Murray State’s Sports in America course, offered every now and again by our Department of History, is a rigorous, reading and writing intensive course. The course includes demanding reading assignments of primary and secondary sources, oral and written student presentations, and mid-term and final essay examinations.
Students are required to read and write a book review, as well as a research paper on a topic of Sports History. The course demands intensive study of the rise of sports in America from Native American Indian games, to the age of folk games in the colonial period, to the age of televised sports in the modern era.
The course requires critical thinking and analysis of the cultural, social, economic, and political aspects of the sporting scene, and extensive study and thought on sports and race issues and sports and gender issues.
OK sports fans. Have I ruined it for you? I hope not, because the course is a celebration of sports in America. The course is also a celebration of the life of the mind and the world of ideas.
We are simply concentrating on a topic of extreme interest and relevance and fun for a large number of Americans (and especially Kentuckians). Sports!
I developed an interest in sports history out of osmosis, I think. As a boy I spent hours studying and discussing and trading baseball cards on my front porch in Dixon, Kentucky with my friend Duane Clark. Memorization of the batting averages, RBIs, home runs, strikeouts, and earned run averages of my favorite New York Yankees taught me the connections between sports and ideas and facts.
My father took my brother and me to see Mickey Mantle as he signed autographs at a Montgomery Ward store in Fort Worth, Texas where we lived at the time. I promptly took the signed baseball home and ruined it with grass stains playing pitch in my back yard. I wish I still had that baseball today, minus the grass stains.
Playing basketball back in Kentucky, often alone on the concrete court behind the old Dixon Grade School, I tried to imitate the picture perfect jump shot form of my hero, Rick Mount, the sharpshooter of the Purdue Boilermakers, the first high school player whose picture graced the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” I idolized the “blond bomber” and I tried to learn everything I could about his background. I am embarrassed to admit that I carried a magazine photograph of Mount in my wallet. Anyway, Mantle and Mount taught me the connection between sports and biography.
In the summers in between semesters at Belmont University, where I played basketball and majored in History, I went with friends to old Bosse Field in Evansville, Indiana to watch the Evansville Triplets, the Detroit Tigers triple-A affiliate.
There, in that historic old ballpark, the location for the shooting of the film, “A League of Their Own,” about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League during World War II, we sat along the third base line, harassing the umpires. We saw future big league stars Mark “the Bird” Fidrych and Kirk Gibson just before they were called up to the Tigers. After the game, we bought hot tamales from a vendor, relishing what we knew to be a “historic experience.” Those game at old Bosse Field taught me the connection between sports and history.
Once, on a weekend, during an autumn semester at Belmont, I went with my east Tennessee teammate, Mitch Keebler, to a home football game at Neyland Stadium at the University of Tennessee. There, we watched the Volunteers play the LSU Tigers before over 80,000 screaming fans. This was more than a mere game; it was a pageant, a social extravaganza, and from that game I learned the connection between sports and society.
As a graduate student at the University of Kentucky I attended all of the home basketball games, the men’s games at Rupp Arena, and the women’s games at Memorial Coliseum. I also sat in Dr. Bert Nelli’s sports history class and his History of UK Basketball course. I learned from those classroom experiences the value of sports as an academic exercise.
I tell you all of that, to try to relate how I came to teach a class in sports history at Murray State. I hope to teach it again and again, because it is such a rewarding experience, rewarding for me at least, and I hope for the students too.
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