Seattle Sports

About

Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City, edited by Terry Anne Scott, explores the vast and varied history of sports in this city where diversity and social progress are reflected in and reinforced by play. The work gathered here covers Seattle’s professional sports culture as well as many of the city’s lesser-known figures and sports milestones. Fresh, nuanced takes on the Seattle Mariners, Supersonics, and Seahawks are joined by essays on gay softball leagues, city court basketball, athletics in local Japanese American communities during the interwar years, ultimate frisbee, the fierce women of roller derby, and much more. Together, these essays create a vivid portrait of Seattle fans, who, in supporting their teams—often in rain, sometimes in the midst of seismic activity—check the country’s implicit racial bias by rallying behind outspoken local sporting heroes.

Listen to Dr. Terry Anne Scott on Seattle University’s Kinesiology Department podcast.

Editor

Terry Anne Scott is associate professor of American History and director of African American Studies at Hood College.

Reviews

“In Seattle Sports: Play, Identity, and Pursuit in the Emerald City, Terry Anne Scott has assembled a wide-ranging and insightful collection of pieces that offer an overview of the intersection of athletic activity and urban life in Seattle. … Rather than seeking to recast, rewrite, or otherwise transform our understanding of how urban life and sporting culture interact, Scott’s volume manages to be local without being parochial. The result is an anthology that will find a ready readership among residents of the Pacific Northwest, scholars of the Seattle metropolitan area, and, in case of the volume’s strongest contributions, general scholars of sport history.”
—Daniel Widener, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Winter 21/22

“Seattle Sports, edited by Terry Anne Scott, is a welcome addition to the Sports, Culture, and Society series edited by David Wiggins for the University of Arkansas Press. As Wiggins notes in the preface, the series provides a forum for ‘a variety of disciplinary areas and methodological approaches’. Based on these criteria, Seattle Sports hits a home run. Of the book’s ten authors, only four are traditional academics, while the remainder are former athletes or simply fans of the sports they write about. All the essays are clearly written and accessible. While some academic sports historians may wish for more historiographical context in some of the essays, others will find the mix of academic and nonacademic essays refreshing.”
—Thomas Clark, Journal of Sport History, Summer 2021

Praise

“From coverage on the Mariners and Supersonics, to lesser-known stories from playgrounds and ball fields buried deep in Seattle’s neighborhoods, this book sparkles with insights about the Emerald City. A fun and lively must-read.”
—Ryan Swanson, author of The Strenuous Life: Theodore Roosevelt and the Making of the American Athlete

Contents

1. Winless in Seattle: A History of the Seattle Mariners, 1977–1994
Chris Donnelly

2. Inconceivable Victors: Lenny Wilkens and the 1978–1979 Seattle SuperSonics
Terry Anne Scott

3. Play/Gay Ball! The Emerald City Softball Association and the Making of Community
Rita Liberti

4. “Is Seattle in Alaska?”: My Life on the City’s Courts and the Centrality of Seattle Basketball in the Creation of Modern Legends
Anthony Washington

5. “That Splendid Medium of Free Play”: Japanese American Sports in Seattle during the Interwar Years
Shelley Lee

6. Seattle’s Rat City Roller Derby: Making Strides and Pushing Boundaries
Jamie Barnhorst

7. Ultimate: Seattle’s Greatest Export
Elliot Trotter

8. Helene Madison, Aquatics Queen: Seattle’s First Sport Hero
Maureen M. Smith

9. More Than Just an Athlete: Race, Identity, and the Seattle Seahawks
Shafina Khaki

10. The First American Hockey Town: Seattle’s Place in the Margins of Hockey History
Christine S. Maggio

Series

Sport, Culture, and Society is a series from the University of Arkansas Press that publishes monographs and collections for academics and general readers in the humanities and social sciences. Its focus is the role of sport in the development of community and the forging of individual, local, regional, and national identities.