Loserville

In Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports, Clayton Trutor crafts a wide-ranging and meticulously researched history of the earliest professional sports franchises in the American South. Utilizing the rich scholarship on mid-twentieth-century Atlanta and a host of archival and newspaper sources, Trutor documents how civic leaders brought major league sport to the state of Georgia and why Atlantans responded with overwhelming apathy. The reasons for the city's “collective shrug” to major league sports are to be found in a host of economic, social, and cultural factors, and Trutor expertly weaves these forces together into a far-reaching and compelling narrative.Loserville takes an expansive look at the history of Atlanta professional sports. Trutor begins the book with extensively researched chapters on Atlanta's political status quo, the national system of “franchise free agency” which made team relocations possible, and the bustling leisure culture that existed in the city before the Braves baseball team ever arrived. Trutor is equally thorough when describing the “Miracle in Atlanta,” the all-hands-on-deck effort to design, fund, and build the fifty-thousand-seat Atlanta Stadium within three years. The scope remains broad and the sources remain comprehensive as Trutor describes the various forces that stymied Atlantans’ enthusiasm for their new franchises, from increasing suburbanization and rising racial tensions to team mismanagement and plain bad luck. Throughout the book, histories of professional sport, Sunbelt development, racial politics, and urban planning combine to create a marvelous picture of Atlanta in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s.Loserville is at its best when Trutor synthesizes these different aspects of Georgia history into one original analysis. The chapter on the populace's indifference toward Atlanta Stadium after its 1965 opening is a particular highlight, as Trutor shows how rapid suburbanization, deteriorating facilities, and poor team performances prevented the new venue from attracting fans and becoming the city's new “center of gravity.” Loserville also excellently highlights the racial dimension of Atlanta's major league apathy, from white suburbanites’ fears of crime around the stadiums to Atlanta sports fans’ unwillingness to support the predominately Black Atlanta Hawks basketball team.By fusing this major league quest together with other histories of Atlanta, Trutor shows that sport was not merely a background event but a contributing force to many of the city's defining twentieth-century developments. After all, Trutor notes that the “Forward Atlanta” policy plan that helped Ivan Allen Jr. win the mayorship promised both stadium construction and school desegregation. Likewise, the fears of homelessness and social disorder that many white suburbanites cited when fleeing to the outlying counties were exacerbated by city hall's decision to bulldoze Black neighborhoods and build stadiums instead of affordable housing. By centering sport as a force in the demographic changes of the city, Trutor expands upon the works of such Atlanta historians as Kevin Kruse and Ronald Bayor. Scholars studying major league sport, racial politics, and Sunbelt development will all find valuable insights here.On the other hand, Loserville's broad and far-reaching scope could disinterest scholars looking for insights on their specialized areas of research. In the middle of the twelve-page discussion on the history of Atlanta's public transportation system, for example, a sports historian might be forgiven for asking, “What does this have to do with sports?” Just as likely, a Sunbelt historian might wonder in the middle of the discussion of the lawsuit between the relocating Braves and their home city of Milwaukee, “What does this have to do with Atlanta?” This tendency toward tangents is most apparent in the conclusion, which documents how San Diego, Tampa, and Phoenix followed Atlanta's lead and similarly quested after major league status. Of course, there are interesting echoes of Georgia in each case, but the conclusion reads more like three unrelated case studies anticlimactically tacked on rather than a fitting conclusion to the remarkable 350 pages that came before. Fortunately, each chapter is short, self-contained, and clearly marks out its focus in the opening pages, so readers can quickly navigate the book and pass over any detours that are of less interest. Such signposting will likewise assist instructors in finding individual chapters to excerpt for a wide variety of courses.Yet while a field-specific tour of the book is certainly possible, Loserville is best enjoyed in its totality. While its breadth and comprehensiveness are an occasional weakness, they are more often the book's greatest strength. Such are the challenges of writing comprehensive and ambitious sport history. Despite the occasional tangent, the writing is always stylish, and the analysis is consistently trenchant. Trutor has masterfully penned an expansive work that demonstrates the powerful ways that sport impacts major league cities. Historians from any number of fields should look to Loserville to further their research frontiers

Archaeology · Atlanta · Metropolitan area · Sociology · American Sports and Literature · History · Sports Analytics and Performance · Sports, Gender, and Society