New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy ed. by Thomas Aiello

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy ed. by Thomas Aiello Christopher R. Davis Aiello, Thomas, ed. New Orleans Sports: Playing Hard in the Big Easy. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2019. Pp. xxiv + 328. Thirteen images, notes, contributors, and index. $29.95, pb. In this anthology, the seventh published by the University of Arkansas Press on the history of sport in a major American city, editor Thomas Aiello examines one of the country's most historic cities, New Orleans. The focus is apropos since, as Aiello notes, "New Orleans was and is a city obsessed with its own history and culture" (xii). Moreover, New Orleans' blend of French, Spanish, Caribbean, African American, and Native influences has long captured the American imagination and, as contributor Stacy Lynn Tanner points out, allowed New Orleans to function "as an economic, political, and a social exception to the South and the nation" (219). Aiello divides the collection into three sections: the first, "Victorian Sensibilities," explores the intersection of sport and class in a city with deep socioeconomic divisions; the second, "Institutions of the City," analyzes the development of major sporting institutions; the final section, "Race and Respectability," addresses "the most consummate form of differentiation in New Orleans," race and its ramifications in sport (xx). Five of the thirteen essays included have appeared previously. While there is some variation in quality, all contain engaging scholarship. Taken as a whole, they make an important contribution to the historiography of sport in New Orleans and to the broader history of the urban South. Horseracing was the first major American spectator sport, and, by the 1850s, New Orleans dominated the American turf. Katherine C. Mooney explores the sport's connections to the southern elite and African American underclass during both slavery and freedom. "To truly understand the significance of racing in New Orleans," Mooney argues, "we have to recognize how tightly tied it was to" slavery (20). For the upper-class horsemen who gathered at the city's St. Charles Hotel, the prestige of racing in New Orleans provided tangible proof of their elite status while showcasing the "overwhelming power of slavery itself" (26). To train and ride their horses, they relied on highly skilled slave labor. The best black trainers and jockeys became prized property who achieved a degree of personal celebrity even as they allowed their owners to further proclaim the efficacy of the slave system. After the Civil War, however, the success and celebrity of free African American horsemen challenged deeply held beliefs about race, gender, and status. As whites unified across class lines to build the Jim Crow system, white horsemen drove their black competitors, including legendary New Orleans jockey Jimmy Lee, from all but the most menial positions. Stephen H. Norwood spotlights the city's biggest annual sporting event, the Sugar Bowl, and the efforts of the New Orleans Mid-Winter Sports Association to use the contest [End Page 294] for "promoting New Orleans as a glittering, economically dynamic New South metropolis" (174). Officials created a prominent bowl game by scheduling top northern teams to meet highly ranked southern opponents. The pageantry of the event glorified the mythic Old South, stimulated sectional rapprochement, and promoted New Orleans as a leader in New South business expansion. Beginning in the mid-1950s, however, as the Deep South unified against racial change, bowl leaders upheld regional custom and only invited segregated teams to the contest. Their stringent loyalty to Jim Crow, Norwood concludes, diminished the appeal of the event and "contributed to the Sugar Bowl's significant loss of status in the next decade" (175). Another organization that experienced negative national publicity because of its commitment to segregation was the Southern Association of the Amateur Athletic Union (SAAAU), southern track's governing body, founded in New Orleans in 1893. Mark Dyerson contrasts the SAAAU's principled support of the proposed American boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics with its long-standing leadership "in New Orleans and southern efforts to draw color lines" (182). The prominence of Catholics and Jews among the New Orleans elite made the city unique in the South and prompted the SAAAU to protest ardently against ethnic and...