CITY OF CHAMPIONS

A history of sports in the Motor City that quickly expands into a history of Detroit itself.

“Sports are and have always been a site of struggles that seemingly exceed them,” write Szymanski, a professor of sports management, and Weineck, a professor of German studies and comparative literature. The authors take an intellectually weighty approach to the business of competitive sports in a city whose economic decline and fall are well documented. The authors name a few heroes whose civic sense has outweighed the trend of exurbanization, such as Little Caesars founder Mike Ilitch, the son of Macedonian immigrants who “became a hero…because he stayed, and with him, his money,” helping fund a sports complex that revitalized the downtown of an urban center. The authors allow that some of the big-ticket franchises have been underperformers since the glory days of Ty Cobb, Al Kaline, and Dutch Clark, but they still have a great effect in building “community and pride.” For all that, some of the best of the city’s athletic enterprises are teams few outside the city have ever heard of—the Roller Derby League, for example, with squads like the Pistoffs (a nice play on the name of the NBA Pistons) and the Detroit City Football Club (soccer), which was “the first American team to sport a uniform featuring rainbow colors in support of the LGBTQ community.” On that theme, the authors point out that racetrack attendance long exceeded that at baseball games “with the single exception of 1948,” even though the state lottery has since displaced track betting. With a palette of sports that includes lacrosse and women’s basketball, however, and with a powerful infrastructure including numerous universities, there’s no reason why Detroit should not be a contender to host a future Olympic Games, “a bit of restitution for the shenanigans of the past.”

A fluid, thoughtful contribution to sports literature, reaching far beyond the confines of Michigan’s premier city.