Fields of Play: Sport, Race, and Memory in the Steel City

by Robert Hayashi

A Pittsburgh Sports History Centering Issues of Race and Economic Disparity 

Americans love sports, from neighborhood pickup basketball to the National Football League, and everything in between. While no city better demonstrates the connection between athletic games and community than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the common association of the city’s professional sports teams with its blue-collar industrial past illustrates a white nostalgic perspective that excludes the voices of many who labored in the mines and mills and played on local fields. In this original and lyrical history, Robert T. Hayashi addresses this gap by uncovering and sharing overlooked tales of the region’s less famous Chinese baseball players, Black women hunters, Jewish summer campers, and coal miner soccer stars. These athletes created separate spaces of play while demanding equal access to the region’s opportunities on and off the field. Weaving together personal narrative with accounts from media, popular culture, legal cases, and archival sources, Fields of Play details how powerful individuals and organizations used recreation to promote their interests and shape public memory. Combining this rigorous archival research with a poet’s voice, Hayashi vividly portrays how coal towns, settlement houses, municipal swimming pools, state game lands, stadia, and the city’s landmark rivers were all sites of struggle over inclusion and the meaning of play in the Steel City. 

264 pages, Hardcover

Published September 26, 2023

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I expected this book to have a predictable focus on black/white racial tensions in Pittsburgh, but Hayashi offers a much broader perspective on race, sport, and identity. I learned a lot, for instance, about the class politics of soccer in the coal towns of Western PA in the 1950s, and about the uses of basketball both to assert and regulate a sense of Jewish identity in Pittsburgh's Hill District and beyond. Hayashi also writes beautifully, and makes powerful use of his experiences as a kid growing up in the Pittsburgh suburbs to lend a personal context to his research.

However . . . The level of sociological detail can be daunting, and I struggled to get a strong sense of an argumentative arc to the book—it seems more like a series of case studies than a single, unfolding line of thought. But still I finished the book a little smarter than when I began it.

[Bill O'driscoll · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pittsburgh native Hayashi explores forgotten and overlooked stories from the city's sporting past, from barnstorming Hawaiian Chinese baseball teams and Black outdoorspeople to the efforts to Jewish community basketball leagues, the efforts to desegregate summer camps, and even the racial politics of the legendary 1970s Steelers. A strong sense of class politics as well. The style is a bit academic, but leavened by personal anecdotes and a real passion for the material. A book for the sports fan who knows sport is about more than what happens on the field.

[Karyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was written with the passion I would expect from another Pittsburgh fan...full of historical anecdotes he uses the lens of sports as he describes the the confluence and clashes of culture in a city that we love even though it disappoints .