Professional golf architects emerged in the early twentieth century across the English-speaking world. These new professionals coalesced around ideas that promoted a Scottish national conception of proper golf. When golf first migrated from the Scottish coasts inland, south into England, and across the oceans to the United States and the British Dominions in the latter half of the nineteenth century, no standardized form or set of ideals on Golf course architecture existed. Through their collective writings, professional golf architects from Britain, the United States, and Canada codified the values, design principles, and the romance of the ancient Scottish linksland courses as the standard way to design and construct golf courses. We therefore position golf courses as important sites of historical inquiry into the transmission of national styles. These Golden Age (1910–37) golf architects thus encouraged the transnational exchange of sport through the construction of golf courses in a peculiarly Scottish sense.
Browse
The Strategic Revolution: Scottish Ideals and Transnational Exchange in Golf Course Architecture, c. 1860s–1930s
Jordan Goldstein and Graeme Thompson
Transnational Sport in the American West: Oaxaca California Basketball
Paulina A. Rodríguez
Building the Transnational “Body Beautiful”—K.V. Iyer and the Circulation of Bodybuilding Practices between India and the United States
Aishwarya Ramachandran and Conor Heffernan
This article examines the career of the Indian physical culturist, K.V. Iyer, and situates his writings from the 1920s and 1930s within a transnational community between India and the United States. Iyer ran several gymnasiums, offered health advice, and sold books and mail-order courses across India and internationally. Previous studies have focused on his yogic practices and anti-colonial thinking, with less attention given to his place in the global bodybuilding community. While his writings were sometimes suffused with political rhetoric, his vision of the ideal citizen was derived from his immersion in Western scientific ideas around physiology and anatomy and his ongoing communication with American physical culturists. Studying a global health community between India and the United States, which first found expression through yoga and the Young Men Christian Association, this article positions Iyer as a leading figure in a global exchange of Indian and American ideas concerning the muscular body.
Sport and Society in Global France: Nations, Migrations, and Corporations
Tom Fabian
Transnational Stereotypes in Professional Wrestling during the Early Twentieth Century in Spain
Carlos García-Martí and Raúl Sánchez-García
This paper analyzes how professional wrestling expanded stereotyped race, national, and class images toward the Spanish public in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The professional wrestling circuit of music halls, theaters, and circuses helped connect a myriad of grappling practices spanning different national traditions. Nonetheless, it also helped convey different racial, ethnic, and national images within a frame of social class divide at a time of rampant imperialism and colonial domination. In this context, Spain experimented with a short-lived wrestling mania, with several international wrestling tournaments and jujutsu exhibitions before World War I. In these tournaments, both fighters and patrons exploited racial stereotypes as a way to better sell the activity to the paying audience, connecting with, but also reinforcing, the perceptions that populated the collective imagination about different people, due to ethnicity or nationality linked also to social class.
“Wrestling with Apartheid”: South Africa–US Amateur Wrestling Relations, Rebel Tours, and the Anti-Apartheid Movement, 1960–1991
Hendrik Snyders
From the onset, South African amateur wrestling, under the auspices of the SA Amateur Wrestling Union and its successors, was organized along racial lines and, under apartheid, it continued to cater exclusively to white amateurs. By 1970, it was suspended from the International Amateur Wrestling Federation. Denied participation in international competition, it resorted to rebel and boycott-busting tours involving a number of sympathetic countries and individuals in Europe, the Americas, and the Far East. Organized mostly clandestinely, it succeeded in offering international competition to the South African national wrestling team for almost two decades. One program, the Oregon Wrestling Cultural Exchange, was particularly strong. This US-based program generated strong opposition from the Amateur Athletics Association, the International Wrestling Federation, and several anti-apartheid organizations. It survived until the end of the 1980s, when the USA Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (1986) and the campaigns of the anti-apartheid movement closed it down.
Volume 52 (2021): Issue 1 (May 2021)
Contributors
L’UFOLEP et sa commission scolaire sous la Quatrième République française : de la réhabilitation à l’embellie d’une voie sportive laïque dans l’école élémentaire
Éric Claverie, Julien Krier, and Jean-François Loudcher
Cette recherche se propose d'éclairer la renaissance d’une fédération affinitaire sous la Quatrième République française, l’UFOLEP. Elle met l’accent sur les difficultés de reconstruction, puis sur la réussite à trouver un espace de développement. Celui-ci prend la voie de l'école élémentaire, par le biais de son ancienne commission scolaire : l’USEP. Dans ce cadre parascolaire, qui rayonne peu à peu à l’enseignement de l’EPS lui-même, l’USEP développe des innovations conformes à son éthique en faveur d’une éducation physique et d’un sport éducatif protégé des voies fédérales classiques. Cette orientation sportive (et non voie) s’accorde bien avec le registre doctrinal de la Ligue de l’Enseignement qui héberge ce mouvement sportif, autour d’une idée laïque repensée dans cette France d’après-guerre. En revanche l’UFOLEP peine à développer sa voie postscolaire qui, après s'être redressée, stagne.