The Sporting World of the Modern South. Edited by Peter B. Miller. University of Illinois Press, 2002. 400 pages, 22 photographs. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

The Sporting World of the Modern South is a collection of 13 essays that illuminate the South’s role in shaping sport and sport’s role in shaping the South. Edited by Peter B. Miller, the book uses the myth and fact of sport as a lens by which to consider the possibility of a distinct South. Exploring ideas of Southern honor, race, and gender, the essays present the various levels of continuity and change found in the South during the 20th century.

Miller separates the volume into three sections. The first, “The Transformation of Southern Sport: Gender, Class, and Some Meanings of Modernity,” includes essays by Miller, Robert Gudmestad, Pamela Dean, and Andrew Doyle. Miller’s essay considers the introduction of team sport in the South following the Civil War and the ideals of virtue and honor that developed because of such “strenuous masculinity”(22). Gudmestad turns his attention to baseball in Virginia during the 1880s and its compatibility with romanticized views of the Lost Cause. Pamela Dean encounters ideas of gender in considering athletics at women’s colleges in the South. Concluding the first section, Andrew Doyle explains the University of Alabama’s football success as a great source of Southern pride and an example of Southern progressive growth.

The second section of the book is devoted to sport in the South during segregation and the role sport played in desegregation. Miller and Rita Liberti look at sport at historically black colleges. Liberti considers Bennett College, for women, and Miller focuses on Howard University. Both essays allow the reader to understand the conflicting opinions that existed over the worth of athletics on a historically black college campus. In Bennett College’s case, leaders questioned the role sport should play in a women’s collegiate experience.

The final three essays of section two center on the role of sports in desegregating society. Charles H. Martin, Jack E. Davis, and Russell J. Henderson all use various sporting events to show how the walls of segregation were slowly crumbling. Martin looks at the Southern traditions of college football bowl games and their desegregation. Davis chooses baseball’s spring training for his venue. Henderson explores the Mississippi State University basketball team’s narrow escape to the national tournament and the state of Mississippi’s subsequent escape from the “unwritten law”(219). Each of the previous three essays displays the importance of sport in the Southern society. While the Sugar Bowl, spring training sights, and the state of Mississippi did not desegregate as quickly as many hoped, the importance of sport in the minds, and perhaps pocketbooks, of Southern organizers allowed previous racial taboos to be broken.

The final section of the book includes four essays that consider the way Southern stereotypes are portrayed in sport. Andrew Doyle returns to the subject of Alabama football, but in this essay the University’s legendary coach Paul Bryant is the center of discussion. Doyle paints Bryant as the symbol of a South caught between the love of tradition and the need for progress. His public praise of the small town, hard working, well-raised Southern young man endeared him to the mothers and fathers of the region. However, his success as a business man pointed to the economic needs and potential of a progressive south. Doyle concludes his essay with a discussion of the desegregation of Bryant’s Alabama football team, and questions what might have happened had the most powerful coach in the South taken a more proactive role.

Following the essay on the powerful sport of football are two intriguing essays on events exploding in popularity. Louis M. Kyriakoudes and Peter A Coclanis look at the phenomenal growth of the professional wrestling’s “sports entertainment” industry. Wove throughout the world of professional wrestling, positive and negative Southern stereotypes continue to entertain crowds across the world. Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki discuss the origins and growth of NASCAR. The Rybackis explore NASCAR’s ties to Southern myth and chivalry and contrast such a reputation with the attempt to make the sport part of mainstream America.

Ted Ownby’s essay “Manhood, Memory, and White Men’s Sports in the American South” concludes the book. With the exception of hunting, Ownby finds sports not to be a part of early 20th-century writers’ definition of the distinct South. He then considers the popularity of modern hunting, college football, and stock car racing and searches for ties to five components of traditional Southern manhood.

Ownby’s work concludes Miller’s collection of various essays that consider the past role of sport in Southern distinctiveness and push historians to consider more heavily the role that sport continues to play. The essays include some, and open the opportunity for more, study on the fans that attend the sports and the way sport is sold to those fans. The far-reaching influence of the Olympic Games might also entice scholars desiring to study the South and sport. Miller’s collection of essays tackles the South in new and intriguing ways, and creates intrigue for similar studies in the future.

J. R. Duke