A highly enjoyable and stimulating mixed bag of short stories from the history of sport

Christian Tolstrup Jensen
Dept of Sport Sciences, Malmö Universitry

Studying to become a historian, I once had a course on how we, the students, should use databases, bibliographies, and existing literature to find relevant literature for our projects. The professor teaching the course also introduced us to the special genre of Festschriften, a genre that she characterised as “secret papers”. She explained how these books often enjoy only limited circulation, their lists of content are almost impossible to find, and they are definitely not indexed in any of the ordinary databases. This has improved since, but the present volume Fred og krig [Peace and war] is nevertheless a good example of my professor’s characteristic, as it is not to be bought in book stores and has not been published by a regular publisher (though a good bit of inquiry ahead of publication of the review has unearthed useful information about this particular Festschrift).

As the name of the genre suggests, these books come by due to special occasions. The one under review here marks the 70th birthday of Matti Goksøyr, professor of sport history at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences (NIH), in, as it says on the back cover: “the way he likes it the best – with new stories”; all in all, the book offers its readers nine of these, sorted into two categories: peace and war.

The peace (or perhaps rather the not-war) section starts with a seemingly ‘typical’ historical account on nationalism in sport with a focus on Sweden. Here, Torbjörn Andersson shows how football objects such as posters, paintings, music – and music specifically related to Sweden’s fixtures against Denmark – helped spread the idea of Swedish nationalism from the upper strata of society to more or less everyone. In addition to the story itself, Andersson’s text also makes a strong plea for the use of sources other than texts and documents.

While each story is interesting, what I enjoyed most about the book was the opportunity to read a mixed bag of short stories from the history of sport told in an engaged language.

This focus on alternatives to just telling a story is present also in the next two texts, by Solveig Straum and Glenn-Eilif Solberg respectively. In the contribution by Solveig Straum, the focus is on methodology in ethnography drawing on personal experiences from a study on sport-based development aid in Tanzania and Zimbabwe in the 1980s. Her text touches upon both the general usability of oral narratives as sources and the intricate problems surrounding studies on development aid due to the many hierarchies and agendas.

In his contribution Solberg takes the anthology in a more theoretical direction with a discussion on the usefulness of sportification [sportifisering]; a term which Guttmann coined in 1978 to describe how games become sport through rationalisation – to put it briefly – and which Goksøyr developed further in 1988. While Solberg argues that the term is still useful, the overview drawing inter alia on work by Gerd von der Lippe also warns against letting the theory overshadow the actors and alternatives to organised, ‘sportficated’ sport.

One such alternative view on sport is the topic of the last text in the peace section, by Finn Olstad. Here the role of beauty in early modern sport is analysed, and how a discussion on beauty begs the question: should one win, or win in the right, beautiful way. Or perhaps this dilemma is false, as beauty and winning are two sides of the same coin as suggested by some boxing commentators: well-trained boxers boxed better technically and aesthetically, making the matches better [“penere”] in general. Olstad also provides an interesting contrasting analysis of Sonja Heine and Laila Schou Nielsen, how the beauty ideals also could have consequences for the individual athlete and function as “social control” in sport and society (p. 77-78).

The discussion on the relationship between sport and society continues in the war section, which starts with an account by Lone Friis Thing on Norbert Elias’ theory of the process of civilisation and the role sport plays in it. The aggressive aspect comes in as sport, according to Elias, is not just an outlet of aggressions but an opportunity to play with feelings such as violence, which are not only “forbidden” but also in a context of war laden with symbolism (p. 85). As Thing points out, one only has to recall the current discussions regarding Russia’s admission to the Olympic Games for a recent, poignant example.

 The texts by the historians Matthew Taylor, Jørn Hansen and Espen Andersen all serve to confirm Thing’s and Elias’ hypothesis: sport and society are closely interrelated and a highly relevant subject for political discussions in the time of war ,albeit in very different ways.

Taylor in his contribution shows how the regulation of sport became a matter of national policies in England during the Second World War. The paper clearly shows how regulating sports however is not a simple matter, in a way that makes one think of both the agency discussions in the text by Solberg and sport as an outlet for aggressions mentioned by Thing.

Hansen in turn takes us to a completely different place but within the same topic and partly same period, in a study on football in the border region between Denmark and Germany from around 1920 till 1945. Linking back also to the text by Andersson, he shows how football in times of war or unrest can offer important points of identification as well as the importance of particular individuals.

Andersen then concludes the section with a historical perspective on the recent debate on sports washing with an account of a Norwegian tour of a Soviet football team and how it was covered in the workers’ press (Arbeiderbladet) compared to the liberal press (Aftenposten). Unsurprisingly the interest was greatest in the former, but Andersen’s point also goes more in the direction of discussing the relevance of sports washing when not talking about just nations but also of more general ideologies such as socialism in the case of Arbeiderbladet.

The division of the contributions in peace and war reflects the research interests of Goksøyr and the role sports play for society regardless of their state, and puts contemporary events into historical perspectives. While each story is interesting, what I enjoyed most about the book was the opportunity to read a mixed bag of short stories from the history of sport told in an engaged language. Being exposed to such different perspectives on sport history in rapid succession made me start to make more or less serious associations and links between the texts, making the book as such an inspiring read.

Finally, speaking of inspiration, one can return to the beginning of the book and the short text about Matti Goksøyr written by his colleague at NIH, philosophy of sport professor Sigmund Loland. In addition to describing Goksøyr as a person, Loland also emphasises the traits of Goksøyr as a sport historian – his curiosity with an open mind with regard to new sources, theories and methods, and a well-developed idea of the value of a good story.

Copyright © Christian Tolstrup Jensen 2024