Winning Is the Only Thing -- Book

Winning is the Only Thing -- Book Review Roberts, R. And Olson, J. (1989). Winning is the Only Thing- Sports in America Since Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. For the American paradigm, winning World War II caused a domino effect of many changes in culture, politics, technology, sociology, gender, and certainly the way most American's perceived themselves and their relationship with the rest of the world.

By 1946 the glow of the end of the war had faded a bit with the realization that a new war, a Cold War, between the United States and its former ally, the Soviet Union, was tantamount to a moral imperative to control the world Similarly, the inrush of former GIs, a GI bill authorizing education and housing opportunities, the new automobile culture, suburbia, and in the 1950s, the television absolutely transformed America's leisure time and rabid fascination with the sporting world.

Baseball had already become America's national sport, and indeed was one of the first indications of integration long before the Civil Rights push in the 1950s, but after World War II, African-Americans were also allowed into baseball and basketball.

Now, with more discretionary income, combined with televised sporting events, Americans not only saw integration at work, they were able to participate, even vicariously, in the world of major league sporting events -- becoming so entranced that as the decades evolved, sports in America became far more than just a pastime -- they became a true American institution. And, like many things American, it was not possible to keep sports contained. Indeed, within just a few decades, the American sporting world became a multi-billion dollar industry.

Sports in America is both a study of the evolution of popular culture in America post-World War II and a way of explaining the tremendous popularity of the entire genre into a "lens through which tens of millions Americans interpreted the significance of their country, their communities, their families, and themselves" (p.xi).

Too, much as the world has globalized through the advent of institutionalized advertising and marketing, Sports in America shows how sports has become a national obsession, really the new cultural currency of the land -- and part of the secularization of America. In fact, the authors posit that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans had a new religion -- sports -- in which they worshiped as the major focus in their lives.

This has become so endemic, according to the authors, that rather than being part of leisure activity, sports in America have become their own raison d'etre and have taken on a life of their own, often transposing semblance to health and fitness pursuits in favor of rampant capitalism. Randy Roberts is Professor of History at Purdue University and author of a number of sports related biographical pieces, among them Jack Dempsey and Jack Johnson.

His research interests focus not only on sports, but on the impact of particularly iconic cultural figures on American popular culture (e.g. John Wayne, Mike Tyson, the My Lai Massacre, etc.) (Purdue University, Department of History, Cited in: http://www.cla.purdue.edu/history/directory/Faculty/Roberts,_Randy.html). James Olson, a colleague of Roberts' and frequent co-author of academic papers, is Professor of History at Sam Houston State University, whose previous books include Saving Capitalism, Catholic Immigrants in America, and The Ethnic Dimension in American History.

Olson is a prolific writer, having written, edited, or co-authored over thirty books. He teaches courses on the Vietnam War, World War II, America Since 1945, and ethnicity and immigration in U.S. History ( Sam Houston State University, Cited in: http://www.shsu.edu/~his_www/olson.html). It was no accident that the authors chose 1945 as the beginning of a new era for American popular sporting culture.

So many events began after World War II that changed American culture; especially the way the United States became the undisputed world economic power and helped rebuilt both Europe and Asia from the devastation of the War. This rebuilding had a number of domino effects, though, particularly in the idea of exporting sports and an American attitude towards them. What follows is an well-written, historically focused, look at the way sports in America evolved from a pastime to an obsession; and from.