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Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports by Clayton Trutor

2022; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 88; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2022.0207

2325-6893

Seth S. Tannenbaum,

American History and Culture

Reviewed by: Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports by Clayton Trutor Seth S. Tannenbaum Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports. By Clayton Trutor. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. xxviii, 458. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4962-2504-7.) Clayton Trutor's Loserville: How Professional Sports Remade Atlanta—and How Atlanta Remade Professional Sports utilizes archival documents from Atlanta's civic leaders and professional sports teams, newspapers, and a bevy of secondary source material to examine how elite Atlantans successfully acquired teams in all four of the major professional sports leagues in the United States. Trutor describes how those teams were received in the city and its rapidly swelling suburbs and assesses the effects of creating facilities that befitted a true "Major League City" on Atlanta's population and finances (p. xvii). Loserville focuses on the decade after the 1966 arrival of the city's first two major professional sports teams, baseball's Braves and football's Falcons. The book's title comes from a series of articles in the Atlanta Constitution in 1975 bemoaning the failures of the four major sports teams both on the field and at the box office. Trutor argues that the failures of these franchises had multiple causes, including the location and amenities of their stadiums amid extreme white flight and a closely related fear of urban crime, their owners' lack of experience running professional sports organizations, and perhaps most important, Atlantans' preexisting sporting cultures and habits. As Trutor demonstrates, high school and college football, stock car racing, and even professional wrestling often drew larger (and in the case of professional wrestling more diverse) crowds than did the Braves, the Falcons, basketball's Hawks, and ice hockey's Flames. Trutor argues that the city's elites on both sides of the revolving door between corporate Atlanta and local elected office aimed to acquire high-level professional teams to create a shared sense of civic belonging. They pursued this vision during an era when white flight, suburbanization, the civil rights movement, and desegregation seemed, from their perspective, to put an end to cross-class and cross-racial unity in the Atlanta area. Acquiring these teams, Loserville shows, did not serve the intended purpose. To the contrary, the facilities constructed to house professional sports, Atlanta Stadium and the Omni Coliseum, heightened the metropolitan divide as stories of crimes committed in their surrounding neighborhoods frequently made the news, hardening white suburbanites' notions about the dangers of urban Atlanta and making them more likely to stay in the suburbs to shop and to entertain themselves. The narratives Trutor offers about Atlanta's often woeful professional sports teams will likely be familiar to sports historians, just as his analysis of the effects of racism, suburbanization, and the rise and fall of political coalitions [End Page 810] will likely be familiar to historians of the Sun Belt. But by putting these two histories together, Trutor has created something new and important. In suggesting that the motivation to acquire major professional franchises and that the broad strokes of those teams' failures were replicated across the Sun Belt in Tampa, Phoenix, and San Diego, he has opened up several avenues for future studies of sports, politics, and social change in the region. At 386 pages of text, the book seems too long to work well in an undergraduate course—which is a shame because the topic would likely attract students, and the analysis would expose them to the politics that have always been part of American sports. Fortunately, many of Loserville's chapters feel as though they were written to be read independently. While this quality and the book's occasional lack of chronological structure can make reading the whole monograph an exercise in repetition, it should allow teachers to use individual chapters in their classrooms quite easily. Additionally, readers unfamiliar with Atlanta's geography and layout can get a bit lost as there are no maps to orient them. These minor quibbles notwithstanding, Loserville is a well-researched and important contribution to sports history and the history of the Sun Belt. Seth S. Tannenbaum Manhattanville College Copyright © 2022 The...