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Summary
Summary
The story of Texas's impact on American sports culture during the civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, this book offers a new understanding of sports and society in the state and the nation as a whole.
In the 1960s and 1970s, America experienced a sports revolution. New professional sports franchises and leagues were established, new stadiums were built, football and basketball grew in popularity, and the proliferation of television enabled people across the country to support their favorite teams and athletes from the comfort of their homes. At the same time, the civil rights and feminist movements were reshaping the nation, broadening the boundaries of social and political participation. The Sports Revolution tells how these forces came together in the Lone Star State.
Tracing events from the end of Jim Crow to the 1980s, Frank Guridy chronicles the unlikely alliances that integrated professional and collegiate sports and launched women's tennis. He explores the new forms of inclusion and exclusion that emerged during the era, including the role the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders played in defining womanhood in the age of second-wave feminism. Guridy explains how the sexual revolution, desegregation, and changing demographics played out both on and off the field as he recounts how the Washington Senators became the Texas Rangers and how Mexican American fans and their support for the Spurs fostered a revival of professional basketball in San Antonio. Guridy argues that the catalysts for these changes were undone by the same forces of commercialization that set them in motion and reveals that, for better and for worse, Texas was at the center of America's expanding political, economic, and emotional investments in sport.
Author Notes
Frank Guridy is an associate professor of history and African American and African diaspora studies at Columbia University. He is the author of the award-winning book Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow and a co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latina/o America . His work has appeared in Radical History Review , Caribbean Studies , Social Text , Cuban Studies , Kalfou , the Journal of Sport History , and Public Books .
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this illuminating survey, Guridy, a Columbia University history professor, details how oil money, racial integration, and feminism transformed sports in the Lone Star State and, later, the whole country. He sets the stage by spotlighting star athletes from Texas, such as 1950s football All-American Doak Walker and 1932 Olympic medalist Mildred Didrickson, and their embodiment of pre-integration and pre-feminism sports in the state. He then details how the flow of oil money into professional and college athletics inspired construction of state-of-the-art sports arenas such as the Astrodome and Texas Stadium, and how the University of Houston and Southern Methodist University were early to integrate their sports teams, an example followed by other schools across the nation as a "seemingly natural segregationist order gave way to a seemingly normal world of racially integrated football," Guridy notes. The Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, meanwhile, created a retrograde-yet-empowering paradox by sexualizing cheerleading while leading the way toward making cheerleaders "genuine national celebrities." This is a fascinating and meticulously researched gem for sports buffs. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
The Lone Star State's transformative role in American sports, from football to tennis and beyond. Guridy, a professor of history and African American Studies at Columbia, shows how, as with so much else in American popular culture, Texas has played an outsize part in the development of sports. He opens with a storied football game between the Don Shula--led Miami Dolphins and Bum Phillips' Houston Oilers, a championship playoff dubbed the Super Bowl by Texas sports entrepreneur Lamar Hunt, who, in 1966, had brokered the merger of the National Football League and American Football League. With the assistance of ABC Sports, football grew to become the most popular sport in the U.S., surpassing baseball. It was a golden age, writes the author, in which, "fueled by a booming energy economy, a group of imaginative sports entrepreneurs teamed up with a host of talented athletes from the laboring classes to usher in an unprecedented era of inclusion and popularity." That athletic labor would soon be sorted into superstars and plebes, with the vast bulk of the money going to a few elite players. Some of them were Black players who were finally allowed to play alongside Whites in Texas in the 1960s, with some of the credit for the end of Jim Crow going precisely to those sports entrepreneurs, who made cities such as San Antonio, Dallas, and Houston into sports powerhouses. Some of the innovations were less creditable: AstroTurf, for instance, "produced…more injuries to players who had the unpleasant experience of being crushed by head-knocking tackles on the concrete-like floor or who ripped up ligaments on zippered seams that stitched the carpet together." Some were true improvements, however, including a "revolutionary event in the history of American sports," namely the first match between professional tennis players who happened to be women, later capped off by the "Battle of the Sexes" between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs at the Astrodome. The author has a keen eye for turning and tipping points, and his lucid narrative serves his thesis well. Sports buffs will find Guridy's explorations rewarding. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
Texas's passion for sport, particularly football, has been celebrated, scrutinized, and even satirized. However, sport in Texas has rarely been the object of critical historical scholarship aside from the work of Latino historians such as Jorge Iber and Ignacio M. Garcia. The Sports Revolution, by Guridy (Columbia Univ.), provides a needed, readable, and analytical perspective on sport in Texas mainly during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. With generous detail, the volume outlines the early development of sports franchises in Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, and offers insights into major college football and basketball programs in Texas. Alongside insightful evaluations of the big movers and shakers of Texas sport during the era, such as Lamar Hunt, Roy Hofheinz, and Darrell Royal, Guridy integrates the troubling experiences of race and gender from the racial integration of the Southwest Conference at Southern Methodist University in the 1960s to the famed "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match in 1973 between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in Houston. Specialists and non-specialists in sport history should find this book rewarding. Summing Up: Recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals. --Joel S Franks, emeritus, San Jose State University,
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| Chapter 1 Sports in the Shadow of Segregation | p. 14 |
| Chapter 2 Spaceships Land in the Texas Prairie | p. 46 |
| Chapter 3 The Outlaws | p. 80 |
| Chapter 4 We've Come a Long Way to Houston | p. 129 |
| Chapter 5 Labor and Lawlessness in Rangerland | p. 171 |
| Chapter 6 Sexual Revolution on the Sidelines | p. 212 |
| Chapter 7 The Greek, the Iceman, and the Bums | p. 259 |
| Chapter 8 Slammin' and Jammin' in Houston | p. 302 |
| Conclusion. The Revolution Undone | p. 342 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 354 |
| Notes | p. 359 |
| Index | p. 382 |
