National Media Coverage and the Creation of a Canadian ‘Hockey World’: The Winnipeg-Montreal Stanley Cup Hockey Challenges, 1899–1903

This essay examines media coverage of five Stanley Cup hockey championship series played between hockey clubs based in Winnipeg and Montreal from 1899 to 1903. Coverage of the Winnipeg–Montreal challenges contributed significantly to the growth of a Canadian ‘hockey world’ – and a broader ‘world of sport’ – during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, press reports and telegraph re-enactments linked fans in Winnipeg and Montreal together. At the same time, newspapers in other Canadian centres provided coverage of Stanley Cup matches. As the media constructed a shared sports information system throughout Canada, people were drawn into a wide-ranging community of interest centred on sport. Telegraph bulletins, in particular, gave fans a strong sense of participation in games that were being played in other places. By 1903, Stanley Cup hockey challenges had become ‘national’ Canadian events, followed by audiences across the country through news stories and ‘live’ telegraph reconstructions.     

‘Our Victorias Victorious’: Media,Rivalry, and the 1896 Winnipeg-Montreal Stanley Cup Hockey Challenges

This study analyzes media coverage of the two Stanley Cup hockey challenges played by the Winnipeg Victorias and the Montreal Victorias in February and December 1896. First presented in 1893, the Stanley Cup symbolized the national hockey championship of Canada. The essay argues that newspaper reports and telegraph reconstructions of early Stanley Cup hockey matches brought Canadians into both local and national communities of interest centred on sport, while helping to create a mediated Canadian ‘hockey world’ in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1896 Stanley Cup contests were likely the first two games in which the technology of telegraphy was applied to the sport of hockey in such a way that large crowds in distant cities could experience matches as they were being played. In addition, this study examines the regional and interurban rivalries that were expressed through Stanley Cup competition. Newspapers depicted Montreal and Winnipeg hockey teams as representatives of east-west conflict and difference, as well as embodiments of community identity and civic pride.     

The Patricks’s Hockey Empire: Cultural Entrepreneurship and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association, 1911–1924

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, two brothers started a professional ice hockey league in the Canadian Pacific Northwest. Their league would go on to challenge for the supremacy of the sport, and its franchises won on several occasions. By bringing hockey to the region, the Patrick brothers helped spread a popular Canadian cultural pastime to a region where it did not exist before thus making them cultural entrepreneurs.     

The decline of the ‘Soccer-Nation’: journalism,soccer and national identity in the 2002 World Cup

This essay analyses the media narrative in the coverage of the Brazilian team during the 2002 World Cup. The corpus of our work is concentrated on the sports supplements of Jornal do Brasil during the 2002 World Cup from two days before the event until two days after its end, reaching the total of 32 supplements. We focus on the hypothesis that the qualification ‘Brazil: the soccer country’, usually even more intense and singular during this worldwide event, has been decreasing and the journalistic narratives about the Brazilian soccer team do not approach soccer homogeneously as a metonym for the nation. The reflection about the role of the sports press as cultural builder is fundamental to observe how newspapers confirm and construct mythologies and identitary discourses, in spite of the journalistic objectivity, one of the pillars of the profession.     

Africa and the ‘World’ Cup: FIFA Politics,Eurocentrism and Resistance

The development of African football in the international playing arena during the last 25 years has been such that several noted commentators have predicted that the name of an African nation will soon be appearing on the World Cup trophy. [1 Most notably, Walter Winterbottom and Pelé expressed their belief that an African nation would win the World Cup before the new millennium. Such predictions remain unfulfilled, but the assertion of the former FIFA President João Havelange that an African team would qualify for the last four by, at the latest, 2002, was a feat that Cameroon and Senegal both narrowly missed out on during the 1990 and 2002 World Cups respectively. See F. Osman Duodo, ‘On the Threshold of Eating With Kings’, FIFA Magazine, Oct. 1996, 13–14. ] With the exception of Senegal's valiant efforts in reaching the quarter-finals of the 2002 tournament, the relatively weak performances of the continent's other representatives at the two most recent editions of the game's premier international tournament would not appear to bear out this assertion. [2 During France ‘98, only Nigeria qualified for the knock-out phase. At Japan/South Korea 2002 only Senegal reached the latter stages of the competition although the four other teams narrowly failed to progress from the group stages. ] The promise offered by Cameroon's quarter-final appearance at Italia 90, Nigeria and Cameroon's Gold medals at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic football tournament and African successes in FIFA's under-age competitions thus remains unfulfilled. [3 Nigeria and Ghana have twice won the biennial under-17 World Youth Championship since its inauguration in 1985. ] However, the disappointment that greeted the early exits of most of the African representatives in 1998 and 2002 should not conceal the fact that, in a political sense, both tournaments were a major victory for the African game. When one considers that African representation at the World Cup has historically been restricted by a Eurocentric bias at the heart of FIFA, the participation of five nations at both France 98 and Japan/South Korea 2002 allows these tournaments to be viewed as significant milestones for African football. Drawing on analyses of primary archival materials and other sources, this essay examines the ways in which the World Cup Finals, and more specifically, the political debate surrounding the distribution of places for the tournament has come to represent one of the key arena's in which Africa's quest for global football equity has manifested itself. [4 For a discussion of Africa's struggle for global equity within FIFA see P. Darby, Africa, Football and FIFA: Politics, Colonialism and Resistance (London and Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 2002). ] The essay concludes by assessing the extent to which the discourse on Africa's place at the World Cup can be read as a reflection of broader First World-Third World power relations.     

‘The finances stagger these fellows’: the Great American Bicycle Trust, 1899–1903

Between 1895 and 1904, over 1,800 separate businesses merged into approximately 150 ‘trusts’, most of them simple horizontal combinations. Less than a third succeeded. One of the more spectacular failures was the American Bicycle Company. Formed by combining 45 bicycle and cycle-parts makers, it lasted less than three years. Various theories have been advanced to explain this abysmal performance, but there appears to have been no single deterministic cause. The firm was inadequate in size and scope, poorly organised, and lacking a clear goal. Its participating owners had disparate, often contradictory, objectives. Its demise left the American industry with a decentralised structure fragmented into competing sub-industries for cycle parts, bicycle fabrication and assembly, and the distribution and marketing of completed cycles. This structure led to market dominance by component firms, minimal profits and high failure rates for cycle makers, and a low overall level of innovation.     

‘See These Brilliant Exponents of the Game’: The England Women’s Hockey Team Tour of Australia and New Zealand, 1914

Abstract

This paper argues that the 1914 England Women’s hockey tour of Australia and New Zealand has an ambiguous place within wider progress narratives of women’s sport. It created some important sporting precedents, being the first time Australian and New Zealand women’s teams had taken the field. The media reception of the tour was mixed. While the social pages and some of match commentary focused on the appearance of the players, the majority presented the tour as a worthy sporting spectacle. Indeed in the final match the New Zealand team was billed as the ‘All Blacks’, the name normally associated with national men’s teams. Moreover, the symbolic importance of the tour was enhanced by the fact that the tourists were accorded the same rites and rituals accorded men’s touring teams to New Zealand: parliamentary and civic receptions; playing in the leading sporting venues and being linked to imperial bonding.     

The inextricable link between sport and the press in the Victorian era: the example of the ‘Sentinel Cup’

During the Victorian era sport underwent what has been described by academics as a ‘revolution’. What began the nineteenth century as largely informal, recreational pastimes with few written rules and a small commercial fringe was transformed into a codified, commercialised, mass-spectator entertainment industry. During this period an inextricable link developed between sport and the press and both became mutually beneficial; sport provided a continuous conveyor belt of content for journalists to report whilst newspapers provided enhanced publicity and exposure in return. However, the press were not merely commentators and observers of sport and several publications took a more central role in its development and organisation. This is exemplified by the Staffordshire Sentinel, a regional newspaper that circulated across North Staffordshire and South Cheshire, which established the self-titled ‘Sentinel Cup’ in 1892. The competition was officially created to develop junior association football in the region, although key stakeholders also had other alternative motives, and it has been contested for 125 consecutive years, making it the longest continuous football cup in Britain. This paper uses the ‘Sentinel Cup’ as an exemplar of how the press became increasingly involved in sport during the Victorian era and explores the competition’s inauguration.     

The Origins of Football Debate: The ‘Grander Design and the Involvement of the Lower Classes’, 1818–1840

This article presents extensive new material in ‘the origins of football debate’ by using the British Library's digitisation project of nineteenth-century newspapers. In so doing, it responds to claims from Graham Curry and Eric Dunning that previous works of the ‘revisionist historians’ John Goulstone, Adrian Harvey and Peter Swain are misleading and have led to hasty conclusions. It evidences a football culture beyond the domain of the public schools and highlights the shift in the locus of games from urban areas to paddocks and fields complying with the Highways and Police Acts. This compliance reduced the number of prosecutions covered in newspaper reports of the day but other games, in which misdemeanours took place, are recorded, suggesting that a broad football culture did still exist in this period. The article rejects Curry and Dunning's thesis surrounding a mid-century ‘civilising spurt’ in sport in favour of explanations surrounding the structural changes taking place in the nineteenth century, including increasing industrialisation, urbanisation, population growth, and migrationary movements. It also emphasises the emergence of a horizontally stratified class-based society and an attack on football games from an emerging social and industrial elite who were looking after their property and commercial interests.     

‘Definitely not Cricket’ the Times and the Football World Cup 1930–1970

In July 1967, 15 million people were glued to their TV sets to watch one of the most audacious BBC outside broadcasts – the climbing of the Old Man of Hoy. A 450-foot crumbling sea stack situated in the Orkneys was conquered by six climbers in a broadcast that has been dubbed the first ‘reality television’ programme. It connected an armchair audience with the elite of a sport subculture intent on conquering one of Britain's most spectacular geological treasures. This paper, which draws on original archive material, autobiographical accounts and press reports, examines the climb and situates the broadcast historically within the evolution of televised climbing in Britain, and considers the continuing and evolving relationship between climbers and the media.     

‘Carry On’: The Response of the Victorian Football League to the Challenges of World War II

The Victorian Football League (VFL) was formed following an acrimonious split with the Victorian Football Association at the end of the 1896 season. Despite being based around clubs located only in Melbourne and Geelong, the VFL soon became Australia's premier football competition. Although much has been written about League players who served in the armed forces during the two world wars, less attention has been given to identifying the issues and challenges that football competitions, and the VFL in particular, had to address if they were to continue to function during times of military conflict. Trials faced by organisers of the code were logistical, political and moral. Player and administrator shortages and a restricted number of venues to play at, were the most obvious challenges. The Australian government assumed control of manpower and resources in January 1942 and placed many restrictions on discretional activities of the population. In this context, a general feeling was that there was little room for organised major sporting competitions because they could detract from the war focus. The way society reacted to the constraints shaped football's direction, and the VFL had to interpret government policy and read the mood of the public before deciding whether to continue playing. In the end, the League, despite criticism from some quarters for continuing its competition, sided with the prevailing view that the public needed a diversion to allow them some relaxation from the pressure of war. This article discusses how the VFL responded to a number of key issues during the critical period between 1942 and 1944.     

The History of Modern Organized Badminton and the Men’s Team Thomas Cup Tournaments, 1948–1979

Modern organized international badminton began with the founding of the International Badminton Federation (IBF) in 1934, consisting of nine founding member associations. The inaugural men’s Thomas Cup tournament began in 1948 when 10 countries took part. Malaya won the Cup four times in 1949, 1952, 1955, and 1967. When Indonesia took part in the tournament for the first time in 1957, there were 19 competing teams. Indonesia won the triannual tournament seven times from 1957 to 1979. Throughout the 11 Thomas Cup tournaments, only two Asian countries have won the Cup. The only European country, Denmark, qualified to play in the finals five times without a single win. Malaya (later known as Malaysia), Indonesia, and Denmark became leading Thomas Cup teams because they produced singles and doubles players that won many All-England Badminton Championship titles. The winners of these titles were generally considered the world champions. The key sources of information for this research consisted of the IBF annual statutes for listing of participating nations, tournament programmes, and rare specialized books on badminton and the Thomas Cup competition. English language newspapers such as the Singapore Free Press and the Straits Times published historical match results for checking the secondary data collected.     

German Sports Shoes,Basketball, and Hip Hop: The Consumption and Cultural Significance of the adidas ‘Superstar’, 1966–1988

During the 1960s, adidas was the world's leading sports footwear manufacturer. Based in Bavaria and with a history stretching to the 1920s, the company dominated elite sports through aggressive promotion and innovative shoes that catered to athletes' needs. The ‘Superstar’ is one of the company's most successful models, still in production over 40 years since its launch in the late 1960s. Designed to wrest control of the basketball market from American rubber companies, in the two decades that followed it developed cultural meanings far beyond those envisaged by adidas, becoming associated with hip hop, a youth music and subculture born in 1970s New York. Arguing that design is shaped by use and consumption is allied to practice, this article examines the processes by which the ‘Superstar’ came into being, placing it into a wider context of changes within basketball, corporate ambition, and international trade. Tracing the actions and influence of young consumers in New York, it also considers how new ways of thinking about the shoe arose, spread, and were eventually commodified by adidas. It argues that a product's meaning can never be fixed, that producers and consumers are engaged in a constant dialogue over how things are used and perceived.     

‘The Best Football Team,The Best Platoon’: The Role of Football in the Proletarianization of the British Expeditionary Force, 1914–1918

This article examines the role of football, alongside other working-class pastimes, in engendering the proletarianization of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) during the Great War. The article details how the nature and longevity of the Great War, allied to the associated need to raise a predominantly working-class ‘civilian army’, stimulated new approaches to sustaining morale which embraced working-class-derived values and customs. The raison d’être of the BEF's combat motivation (why a soldier should fight) increasingly depended upon workplace-centred notions of solidarity and mutuality. In military terms, these proletarian set of motivational influences became known as ‘loyalty to the primary group’, and the proletarian sport of football became one of the major vehicles for their diffusion. Concurrently, troop entertainments and recreations became dominated by some of the temporary escapes of proletarian culture – most notably organized football tournaments, but also music hall, cinema, fairs and trips to the seaside. By 1918 the BEF was decidedly proletarian, not just in its composition but also in its values and customs.     

An Exception in War and Peace: Ipswich Town Football Club,c. 1907–1945

This article explores the development of a football club as a means of understanding its late adoption of professionalism and its unusual wartime conduct. Ipswich Town were the only Football League team not to kick a ball for the duration of the Second World War. Arguably, the underlying causes of the club's inactivity in both global conflicts can be found in the patriotic and staunchly amateur ethos that permeated the organisation, resulting in a very late conversion to the professional game in 1936. When the Amateur Football Association (AFA) seceded from the Football Association (FA) in 1907, Ipswich Town sided with the gentlemen amateurs and competed in the socially-exclusive Southern Amateur League until the season before the club adopted professionalism. The unique nature of Ipswich Town's evolution offers an opportunity to explore the decline of this branch of the game in the face of professional football, the protagonists who were caught up in it, and the relationship between football and civic pride. In wartime, the human and social continuities between the professional company and its amateur predecessor arguably proved to be more influential than the ruptures that resulted from a controversial inter-war abandonment of cherished amateur principles.