review of Jaime Schultz Moments of Impact (original) (raw)

Recent years have seen a growing awareness of, concern about and action on injuries in high impact contact sports. While policy makers and sports' governing bodies may only just be beginning to pick up the issues, to realise that they might have to be seen to do something and in some cases it seems to feign shock that their sport might just be dangerous, players and analysts have long know of that danger. For historians, Jaime Schultz's excellent Moments of Impact is a polysemous text exploring three cases of sports injury in (American) football in college sport, with significance for how we do history, for how we think about sports 'heroes' and their memories and memorialisation, and for how we think of the significance of sport in the USA. That's an awful lot to carry for 146 pages of text, but it works. These three cases explore incidents involving black footballers at predominantly white colleges and universities (PWCU) in Iowa. Jack Trice played two games in 1923 for Iowa State University, was seen by many as having enormous potential, was the only African‐American player on the team and died from injuries sustained in the second game. Ozzie Simmons was, again, the only Black player in his team from the University of Iowa and for many offered the hope of reinvigoration of the University of Iowa team in the mid‐1930s and was seriously injured in a game against the University of Minnesota part way through his first of several seasons playing college football. Johnny Bright, also a very talented player inspiring his team to performances significantly better than previous years and the only African‐American on the Drake University team in the early‐1950s was knocked out three times in the first quarter of a game against Oklahoma A&M in 1951, an incident that although effectively ending Bright's season also resulted in Drake withdrawing from Missouri Valley Conference (the league including Oklahoma A&M). These are incidents lasting only a few seconds, and in the case of Bright spread out over only a few minutes, but they have enough about them for Shultz to take as the basis of a rich narrative of justice, injustice, the past in the present and the reinscription of the past by the present. In dealing not with teams, seasons, conferences but with individuals, incidents and their place in histories of the present she is able to explore the politics of remembering as well as the politics and poetics of history‐making. The substance of the book deals not so much with the moments of impact on the field, but the moments of (historical/social) impact decades later as College and University administrations come under pressure to make and commemorate these three young Black men, in an overwhelmingly White state with an overwhelmingly White university system. With care and empathy as well as nuanced consideration of the times in which the incidents occurred Schultz constructs narratives of remembering, of memory, of commemoration that sees each of these events as a racialized construction of what were, almost certainly, racialized acts.