San Francisco Bay Area Sports

On June 19, 2015, five hundred thousand fans took to the streets of downtown Oakland, California, to cheer the Golden State Warriors in their first National Basketball Association championship in forty years. Even as the parade proceeded, unease rippled through the crowd. The team had recently announced plans to relocate to a new billion-dollar arena in San Francisco by the 2019–2020 season—a highly charged topic that reflected long-simmering tensions and civic rivalries. This juxtaposition of celebration and angst serves as a reminder, assert the co-editors Rita Liberti and Maureen M. Smith, that “sport, both in contemporary and historical form, is deeply connected to any number of political, economic, and social realities” (p. xi). So begins this engaging volume of sporting histories in the San Francisco Bay area. The editors do not organize the fifteen essays in any discernible manner, nor do they offer overarching themes, other than sports in the Bay Area and the Bay Area in sports. Instead, each essay is a separate, historically contextualized inquiry into a particular time and place. The approach, though unconventional, works wonderfully because the essays are gems. The subject matter ranges from the familiar (professional teams, though not the Golden State Warriors; collegiate athletics; and Bay to Breakers, the most famous footrace in the world) to the more obscure (horse racing in the East Bay in the nineteenth century; the tennis rebel Rosemary Casals in the twentieth century; and sports-talk radio in the twenty-first century). The contributors—historians, kinesiologists, and sociologists—offer careful and diligent analyses, each lovingly researched and written

Advertising · Archaeology · Art history · Basketball · Bay · Championship · Downtown · Media studies · Parade · Political science · Politics · Recreation · Sociology · Spectator sport · State (computer science · American Sports and Literature · History · Law · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society