Reconstructing Fame
Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations
With contributions by Prosper Godonoo, Urla Hill, C. Richard King, David J. Leonard, Jack Lule, Murry Nelson, David C. Ogden, Robert W. Reising, and Joel Nathan Rosen
Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations includes essays on Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Curt Flood, Paul Robeson, Jim Thorpe, Bill Russell, Tommie Smith, and John Carlos. The essayists in this volume write about twentieth-century athletes whose careers were affected by racism and whose post-career reputations have improved as society’s understanding of race changed. Contributors attempt to clarify the stories of these sports stars and their places as twentieth-century icons by analyzing the various myths that surround them.
When media, fans, sports leagues, and the athletes themselves commemorate sports legends, shifts in popular perceptions often serve to obscure an athlete’s role in history. Such revisions can lack coherence and trivialize the efforts of some legendary competitors and those associated with them. Adding racial tensions to this process further complicates the task of preserving the valuable achievements of key players.
David C. Ogden is associate professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is coeditor of Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace; A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes; and Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations, all published by University Press of Mississippi. Joel Nathan Rosen is associate professor of sociology at Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is author of The Erosion of the American Sporting Ethos: Shifting Attitudes Toward Competition and From New Lanark to Mound Bayou: Owenism in the Mississippi Delta,and coauthor of Black Baseball, Black Business: Race Enterprise and the Fate of the Segregated Dollar, published by University Press of Mississippi. He is founding coeditor of a five-volume collection that explores the forging and maintenance of the reputations of celebrity athletes: Fame to Infamy: Race, Sport, and the Fall from Grace; A Locker Room of Her Own: Celebrity, Sexuality, and Female Athletes; Reconstructing Fame: Sport, Race, and Evolving Reputations; More than Cricket and Football: International Sport and the Challenge of Celebrity;and The Circus Is in Town: Sport, Celebrity, and Spectacle, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
