The best books taking seriously the impact of sport on social history

Most Canadians are likely unaware that Canada has an official national summer game and that it is lacrosse. Even fewer realize that the sport reflects a tangled story of appropriation and reappropriation that exposes complex relationships between European and Indigenous peoples.

In a provocative and creative book, Downey, an Indigenous historian, uses First Nations storytelling and his own rigorous research to follow the transformation of lacrosse by Anglophone Montrealers and their exclusion of Indigenous players.

By the end of the nineteenth century, lacrosse was the most popular sport in Canada, before giving way to hockey. Then, almost a century later, the sport was reclaimed by a new generation of Indigenous athletes and activists who used the game as part of a broader cultural and spiritual renewal.

For these athletes, the current goal is to have the Haudenosaunee Nationals recognized as an independent participant at the Olympic Games in 2028.

Canadians have long worried about their national identity. Indeed, some have considered whether or not there even is one.

Poulter, in her innovative and stimulating book, examines an early attempt in the mid-nineteenth century to create an imagined Canadian identity. Wishing to distance themselves from a quintessential “British” identity, second-generation Montreal Anglophones were searching for a new way to identify. They saw themselves as “native Canadians”.

To solidify this identity, they pursued, as Poulter explained, “national attributes, or visual icons, that came to be recognized at home and abroad as distinctly “Canadian.’” It meant, in practice, taking up propriate costumes and sports such as snowshoeing, tobogganing, winter hunting, and lacrosse. All of these activities – undertaken in sartorially correct attire – had previously been the preserve of the Indigenous and French Canadians. Here, was an Englishness reimagined on a frozen landscape.

By imposing perceived British attributes of order, discipline, and fair play onto these activities the Anglophone minority created their new image of “Men of the North”. A century and a quarter later, the NBA’s Toronto Raptors would renew again this frontier identity, asking their fans to cast themselves as “We the North”.

This book is a great read, a superbly written morality play about the triumph of the underdog and the cathartic effect of sport. Brown, a former teacher of creative writing, now specializes in dramatic narrative nonfiction.

In The Boys in the Boat, Brown recounts the efforts of a group of young men at the University of Washington to reach their dream, winning gold in the coxed eights at the 1936 Olympics. The book vividly captures the physical and psychological demands placed on the neophyte rowers, demands that winnow out all but the toughest competitors.

Brown grounds his story by focusing on Joe Rantz, a working-class adolescent hardened by personal adversity for whom rowing is the route to redemption. The clash in the finals of the working-class Americans against a German boat backed by Hitler makes for a dramatic finish (even though an American coxed eight had won gold in the previous five Olympics). 

Winders captures the hardening racial attitudes of America’s “Gilded Age” and white society’s embrace of segregation and exploitation in his study of one of the all-time great fighters.

A man of contradictions, George Dixon would become a famous world champion and one of North America’s richest and most popular Black men. Dixon would also die of alcoholism, destitute, alone, and forgotten. Winders claims that, to the then fledgling Black culture in North America, “Dixon was the single-most significant athlete of nineteenth century.”

Yet at the same time, he was a man “who could be indifferent to his race.” Satisfied to live in a white world that celebrated him while he was winning, Dixon found that that same world could turn on him when he was too successful. His gory victory over Jack Skelly in the 1892 Carnival fight in New Orleans put an end to mixed race fights in the South and further fueled racism.

Winders’ engagingly written book draws the reader into the fascinating era of boxing as it transitioned from the savage bare-knuckle era to the only slightly less violent age of six-ounce gloves, weight classes, and commercialization.

Ken Dryden is a lawyer, a politician, and a gifted writer. He also happens to be one of the most important goaltenders in Canadian hockey history.

Armed with such lived experience and trained in a variety of disciplines as he has been, Dryden provided hockey with its central and perhaps most enduring literary work. Unlike some of our other choices, The Game is less about larger socio-cultural trends (though there is some of this, especially when he recounts his crucial role in the famous Summit Series against the Soviets in 1972), but rather more about the inner dynamics of a team and what it means to win or lose together in professional sport.

Dryden’s work is, yes, historical, but also highly philosophical; his unique position in goal gave him an ice-level perspective that few enjoy (his iconic stance, gloves atop stick, ever-observing play at the opposite end has already been rendered in bronze).

Fewer still have the vocabulary and turn-of-phrase that Dryden possesses. The result is a breathing and yet unmatched testament to the minute workings and endless on-ice machinations of Canada’s favourite sport.