Winning Is the Only Thing: Sports in America Since 1945 Review

Introduction: Sports and the Postwar American Transformation

For the American paradigm, winning World War II caused a domino effect of changes in culture, politics, technology, sociology, gender relations, and the way most Americans perceived themselves and their relationship with the rest of the world. By 1946, the glow of the war's end had faded somewhat with the realization that a new conflict — the Cold War between the United States and its former ally, the Soviet Union — had become tantamount to a moral imperative to control the world.

It was no accident that Roberts and Olson chose 1945 as the beginning of a new era for American popular sporting culture. So many transformative events followed World War II, particularly as the United States became the undisputed world economic power and helped rebuild both Europe and Asia from the devastation of the war. This rebuilding produced its own domino effects, most notably in the idea of exporting sports and an American attitude toward them.

Television, Integration, and the Rise of Sports Culture

The return of former GIs, the GI Bill authorizing education and housing opportunities, the new automobile culture, suburbanization, and — most consequentially in the 1950s — television absolutely transformed America's leisure time and its fascination with sports. Baseball had already become America's national sport and was one of the first arenas of racial integration, well before the Civil Rights push of the 1950s. After World War II, African Americans were also admitted into baseball and basketball.

With more discretionary income and the arrival of televised sporting events, Americans not only witnessed integration in action — they were able to participate, even vicariously, in the world of major league sports. They became so entranced that, as the decades evolved, sports in America grew into far more than a pastime; they became a true American institution. And, like many things American, sports could not be contained. Within just a few decades, the American sporting world had grown into a multi-billion dollar industry.

Sports in America is both a study of the evolution of popular culture in the United States after World War II and an explanation of the genre's tremendous popularity — serving as a "lens through which tens of millions of Americans interpreted the significance of their country, their communities, their families, and themselves" (Roberts and Olson, p. xi).

Sports as Secular Religion and Capitalist Enterprise

Much as the world has globalized through institutionalized advertising and marketing, Sports in America demonstrates how sports became a national obsession — the new cultural currency of the land — and a central feature of America's secularization. The authors argue that by the late 1970s and early 1980s, Americans had adopted a new religion: sports, which many worshiped as the primary focus of their lives.

This phenomenon had become so endemic, according to Roberts and Olson, that rather than remaining part of leisure activity, sports in America had taken on a life of their own — a genuine raison d'être — often displacing concerns about health and fitness in favor of rampant capitalism. The result is a portrait of a nation whose sporting culture had transcended entertainment to become something closer to a civic faith.