Abstract
On January 26, 2020, the retired Los Angeles Lakers icon Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash on his way from downtown Los Angeles to a youth basketball tournament just outside the city in Thousand Oaks. His thirteen-year-old daughter Gianna, who was set to compete in the tournament, also perished along with the seven others in the helicopter. A flood of mourning ensued throughout Los Angeles to remember one of the city’s great athletes. Thousands of heartbroken fans stood vigil outside of the Staples Center where the Lakers compete. They blanketed the grounds with flowers, notes, and memorabilia honoring Bryant. Scores of murals blossomed across the city to celebrate the basketball star. The memorials showcase Bryant’s immense importance to Los Angeles—an expansive city often reputed to lack a cohesive cultural identity. “Outsiders sometimes say Los Angeles, sprawling and segregated, lacks heart and soul,” wrote the New York Times’s Miriam Jordan. “The outpouring of grief for Bryant has proved otherwise. People across socioeconomic, ethnic and geographical boundaries united to mourn the player who devoted 20 years to the Lakers—and by extension to their city.” 1 Bryant’s death solidified Los Angeles’s disputed cultural heritage.
But Bryant’s passing also shows how such invented traditions selectively ignore, and even suppress, elements that might complicate the idealized stories that constitute them. This is particularly relevant in the world of sport, which is so rife with hero worship. Memorials to Bryant stressed his prodigious basketball talent, commitment to his family, and affection for Los Angeles. They typically left out his 2003 arrest and trial for sexual assault. While this omission is unsurprising, it demonstrates how Los Angeles’s sporting culture is formed through a tension between highlighting the positive and excluding the unfavorable. This is particularly relevant to Los Angeles, a city that is perhaps most famous for its legacy of producing salable facades.
The tension between sport’s capacity to create a city’s identity and muffle discord composes a major theme in Wayne Wilson and David K. Wiggins’s edited collection LA Sports and Barry Siegel’s Dreamers and Schemers. Although the authors consider Los Angeles sports from different angles, the books are productive companions. Beyond illuminating many facets of LA sports culture, they combine to demonstrate what scholars might gain from journalists and what journalists might pick up from scholars.
LA Sports is part of the University of Arkansas Press book series Sport, Culture & Society, edited by Wiggins, a prolific sport historian at George Mason University who has served as president of the North American Society for Sport History. The series “focuses on topics ranging from urbanization and community development to biographies and intercollegiate athletics” (p. ix). LA Sports is one of several edited collections in the series devoted to exploring sport’s role in and relationship to individual American cities. Others include DC Sports (2015), Baltimore Sports (2016), Philly Sports (2016), San Francisco Bay Area Sports (2017), New York Sports (2018), New Orleans Sports (2019), Seattle Sports (2020), and Twin Cities Sports (2020).
LA Sports is one of the series’ better volumes and features a diverse collection of scholars who tackle a broad swath of subject matter—from the 1980s “Showtime” Lakers to the less widely remembered histories of auto racing and figure skating in southern California. It is co-edited by Wiggins and Wayne Wilson, the recently retired vice president for education services at the LA84 Foundation, an organization formed after the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles that houses one of the nation’s most impressive sport history archives. A more qualified editorial team for this book would be difficult to find.
Mark Dyreson’s introduction sets a high bar for the edited collection by identifying the nuances marking Los Angeles’s complex and conflicted sporting culture. Dyreson opens with a discussion of Randy Newman’s 1983 song “I Love LA,” an anthem for the city that is routinely used as a rallying cry at local sporting events. “I love LA!” Newman repeats in the song’s chorus, immediately followed by a group shouting “We love it!” Although “I Love LA” is frequently put to promotional use, Dyreson points out that the song also offers a sarcastic takedown of the city’s superficiality, self-absorption, and rampant inequity. “While some see it as a catchy pop tune that showcases the glamor, pleasures, and sparkle of Los Angeles, others understand it as an acidic commentary on a community that is vapid, shallow, and illusory” (p. 7).
The anthology’s chapters build on Dyreson by exploring both how sport participates in manufacturing Los Angeles’s glitzy identity and how it can reveal the cracks that the status quo seeks to paper over—from economic exploitation to systemic racism. For instance, Gregory Kaliss’s “‘Never Go Back’: Pasadena Racial Politics and the Robinson Brothers” offers a new interpretation of Jackie Robinson’s well-worn biography by exploring the fate of his brother Mack, a similarly brilliant athlete who won a silver medal in the 1936 Olympics for the 200-m sprint. In particular, Kaliss explains the bigotry Mack Robinson faced in his hometown of Pasadena during and after his stellar athletic career. Pasadena’s “white civic culture sought to minimize the significance of” Robinson’s athletic accomplishments “and to perpetuate the systematic racism that kept African Americans in an inferior place” (p. 151). As Mack Robinson bitterly remembered, “Pasadena was as prejudiced as any town in the south. They let us in all right, but they wouldn’t let us live” (p. 151). Pasadena eventually created a memorial honoring both Robinson brothers in 1997—long after the damage had been done. But Mack Robinson’s struggles reveal how cities often take pride in their athletes’ triumphs only to discard those sporting heroes once they have exhausted their usefulness—a mistreatment that disproportionately impacts people of color.
Tolga Ozyurtcu’s “Shaping the Boom: Los Angeles Surfing from George Freeth to Gidget” provides an interdisciplinary take on one of southern California’s most emblematic sporting activities. Ozyurtcu shows the intersecting factors that combine to equate surfing with the “cool” California lifestyle—sport, media, fashion, economics, and technology. Ozyurtcu also pays careful attention to which bodies gain easy inclusion in this hip subculture and which are typically prohibited. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates how the regional lifestyle that surfing symbolizes is wrapped up in the cultural industries that sell this fantasy to consumers who seek membership into it.
Other chapters in LA Sports yield novel insights by adopting methods that productively span beyond historiography and textual analysis. “Pitches Less than Perfect: Notes on the Landscape of Soccer in Los Angeles,” for example, adapts entries from Jennifer Doyle’s blog on pick-up soccer in Los Angeles. The vignettes showcase the place of sport in everyday life through recreational games that generally receive no media coverage or other historical documentation. One particularly telling section outlines a controversy that ensued after the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) fielded a team in one league whose civilian participants largely felt disenfranchised by the LAPD. Doyle demonstrates how the discord between the police and citizens extended onto the pitch, where they all ostensibly shared the same status and were beholden to the same rules. Political scientists Greg Andranovich and Matthew J. Burbank explore how Los Angeles citizens’ relationship to local government has grown increasingly contentious as more privately owned stadiums and arenas seek public funds to offset their costs. Rooted in social science, their chapter offers useful context for the role sport has played in literally building Los Angeles, which can be traced back to the construction of Memorial Coliseum in advance of the 1932 Olympic Games.
Several selections in the anthology touch on the 1932 Games—a pivotal moment in Los Angeles history that helped to establish the city as a major global metropolis. A highlight of these discussions is Sean Dinces’s “The 1932 Olympics: Spectacle and Growth in Interwar Los Angeles.” The chapter historicizes and critiques how the 1932 Games branded Los Angeles as an alluring destination and composed a starting point for the now-commonplace partnerships between the private and public sectors to create massively expensive stadiums. These efforts, as Dinces puts it, “formalized alliances between private capitalists and municipal officials—alliances that, much like today, subverted local democratic processes and minimized the risk borne by private capital” (p. 130). While such projects are often presented as cures for economic woes, Dinces claims they amount to “little more than corporate welfare under the banner of ‘economic development’” that exacerbates extant inequities. For instance, Olympic organizers used Los Angeles’s rich Mexican heritage to promote the city as an ideal place for the Multicultural Games, while local authorities actively discriminated against the Mexican community that embodied the very heritage that the Olympics initiative was exploiting. Dinces calls the efforts to brand Los Angeles as a diverse utopia “a smokescreen that obscured the profound socioeconomic fissures in pre-New Deal Los Angeles” (p. 146). The 1932 Olympics forged a sturdy template that has become commonplace across the United States and that Dinces examines in his Bulls Markets. 2 While Dinces focuses on Chicago’s United Center arena (home of the National Basketball Association’s Bulls and the National Hockey League’s Black Hawks), the machinations that fueled the project and the inequities it perpetuated can be traced back to the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles realtor William “Billy” Garland was a key player in the effort to secure the 1932 Olympic Games. Dinces’s chapter briefly explains how Garland convinced the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to stage the Games in Los Angeles, which was still a relatively obscure city at the time. Dinces also outlines how the master salesman gathered public support by claiming that the Olympics would positively promote Los Angeles to the rest of the world and boost its economy. The Olympics offered this positive promotion, and businesspeople like Garland benefited handsomely from the marketing.
Garland is a fascinating and charismatic individual whose full story is beyond the scope of Dinces’s critical and interdisciplinary historiography. But Barry Siegel’s Dreamers and Schemers devotes most of its attention to telling the story of how Garland made the 1932 Olympics a reality. Siegel directs the Literary Journalism program at University of California, Irvine, and was a Pulitzer Prize–winning national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times before joining academe. Dreamers and Schemers is his eighth book, and fifth work of narrative nonfiction.
Siegel depicts Garland as a tenacious and wily underdog who pulls off a seemingly impossible fantasy that puts Los Angeles on the global map. Garland was Los Angeles’s most prominent realtor during the early twentieth century—a well-connected and well-liked schmoozer. The high-profile businessman served on several civic organizations that worked to stimulate commerce. One group of boosters reasoned that the Olympics would offer an effective way to increase tourism and lure homebuyers. Garland was a natural choice to lead these efforts. He launched a broad-based campaign to convince the Euro-centric IOC to hold the 1932 Games in Los Angeles—a weeks-long voyage from Europe at the time—and to sell skeptical Angelenos on the expensive and unusual idea. Garland employed various media to promote the initiative. He conscripted the help of his friend Harry Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, used radio broadcasts, and recruited the film stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to mold public opinion. These efforts built an image for a city that is now famous for creating images. Had Randy Newman’s song been around at the time, Garland would have gladly put it to unironic use.
The push to sell Los Angeles emphasized its weather, multiculturalism, and the film industry. The Olympic promotion campaign also obscured lurid Hollywood scandals, racial discord, and a 1924 pneumonic plague epidemic that killed thirty people. Garland’s biggest public relations hurdle was the Great Depression. The IOC understandably wondered whether Los Angeles—or any city in the United States—could adequately stage a major sporting event amid the economic crisis. And frustrated citizens expressed bewilderment that the city would be devoting resources to a sporting event while many were hungry and out of work. Protesters in Sacramento carried signs that read “Groceries Not Games” in a vain effort to cancel the Olympics and redirect funds to more urgent needs. Garland falsely reassured the IOC that the Depression would be long over by the time the Games kicked off, and he did not mention the protests. The dreamer and schemer persevered, and the Games were, by most accounts, a resounding success. The New York Times called them “the greatest spectacle in California history.” As Siegel dramatically puts it, “Billy had literally imagined the LA Games into being” (p. 2).
Dreamers and Schemers is a meticulously researched chronicle that makes use of several archives, including the LA84 Foundation library and the special collections at University of Southern California and Occidental College. This archival work shines brightly when Siegel recounts correspondences between Garland and IOC president Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics movement. The conversations showcase their sometimes-heated negotiations and trace their relationship’s development from a wary business partnership between two men used to getting their way into something that resembles a friendship. The book also includes vital material on the history of women’s athletics. The Los Angeles Games were only the second Olympiad to include women. Dreamers and Schemers includes discussions of athletes like the Seattle swimmer Helene Madison and others who have not received nearly the attention they merit.
Siegel could be far more critical of Garland and the Los Angeles Olympics. For example, he could do more to connect the dots between the 1932 Games and the economic, cultural, and political legacy they spawned. Siegel often glosses over thorny and potentially complicating details in the interest of maintaining its Garland-centered story, which, at the end of the day, is not exceptionally dramatic. Indeed, those of us who work on sport history have encountered many tales about flawed underdogs who persevere against the odds. While Siegel does not let Garland off the hook, he could have delved much further into the self-interested motives guiding the realtor’s activities. Garland was a rich white man who was helping other rich white men to gain public support for an endeavor that would make them even wealthier. He lived in a neighborhood that prohibited the sale of homes to black families, and he served as president of an athletic club with prejudiced membership policies. Although Siegel acknowledges these flaws, they often take a backseat to Garland’s triumphs when they could have been used to draw some important lines between the Los Angeles Games and the discriminatory elements that mark their heritage. Many of the athletes who represented the United States in the Los Angeles Games, anticipating Mack Robinson, were unable to find gainful employment after their stellar performances. Helene Madison, for instance, could not even secure a job as a swimming instructor in her hometown after earning three gold medals. Billy Garland, by contrast, did quite well after the Olympiad. Siegel would have done well to give more attention to the power dynamics at the heart of a sporting spectacle that ostensibly celebrated competing athletes but ultimately most benefited the businesspeople who used those athletes to publicize Los Angeles. All this said, Dreamers and Schemers is essential and engaging reading for anyone interested in the 1932 Olympics Games or the broader history of sport in Los Angeles.
Combining LA Sports and Dreamers and Schemers produces helpful insights that neither book would offer independently. LA Sports addresses some of the questions Dreamers and Schemers leaves unanswered. Wilson and Wiggins give space for scholars like Kaliss to explore in detail those obscure but important sports figures that Siegel mentions in brief. In fact, the Seattle Sports anthology includes a chapter on Helene Madison by Maureen M. Smith that supplements Siegel’s discussion of the swimmer. 3 In focusing on Memorial Coliseum, Siegel notes that stadium construction “stirs some ambivalence among sport historians” without doing much to explain these mixed feelings (p. 41). Luckily, the LA Sports chapters by Dinces and Andranovich and Burbank, as well as a piece on the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics by Matthew P. Llewellyn, Toby C. Rider, and John Gleaves, explore these debates for those who want to know more.
Siegel’s Dreamers and Schemers shows the immense value of storytelling and offers a literary and narrative-driven sensibility that could have enhanced LA Sports’s individual parts and overall arrangement. The anthology’s organization, for instance, is somewhat confusing. It makes good sense to juxtapose Ted Geltner’s chapter on Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray with Elliott J. Gorn and Allison Lauterbach Dale’s piece on Los Angeles Dodgers announcer Vin Scully. But why not combine them with Daniel A. Nathan’s selection on sports films, the only other piece that focuses on sport and media? Similarly, while Llewellyn, Rider, and Gleaves’s chapter on the 1984 Games nicely complements Dinces’s work on the 1932 Olympics, the chapters are separated by three other selections devoted to entirely different topics. Why not put them side by side, eliminate some of the repetition across these two related chapters, and have them work together? To be fair, few read edited collections from front to back. However, LA Sports missed an opportunity to become one of those rare anthologies that is greater than the sum of its parts. It strikes me that a writer with Siegel’s flair for storytelling would have sequenced the book very differently.
Scholars and journalists often produce complementary work, but they too seldom fully embrace the tools of the other’s trade. When placed side by side, LA Sports and Dreamers and Schemers combine to show how journalists’ work could be sharpened by scholars and how scholars’ work could be aided by journalists.
These two books also complement other recent works on the history, culture, and politics of sport in LA. Most specifically, Jerald Podair’s City of Dreams (2019) explores several threads mentioned in LA Sports and Dreamers and Schemers. The volumes also dovetail nicely with recent general works on sports and place, such as Benjamin D. Lisle’s Modern Coliseum (2017); Matthew C. Ehrlich’s Kansas City vs. Oakland (2019); and Frank Andre Guridy’s The Sports Revolution (2021). 4
Finally, LA Sports and Dreamers and Schemers offer helpful context for the changing dynamics of sport and cities as the world adjusts to the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympic Games. The 2028 Games will be the first Olympiad in the United States since COVID-19 and, as a result, will confront dramatically different cultural, economic, and public health realities from its predecessors. While this future is uncertain, it seems safe to surmise that those orchestrating the Games will take tips from Billy Garland’s durable playbook in attempting to make the event seem as beneficial and safe as possible despite the concerns that will inevitably arise. And Randy Newman’s tune will probably figure in as well.