Category Archives: Sports History

National Logos

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Note: This post was originally published in July. When I corrected an error that I noticed, WordPress somehow considered it a new post, thus its appearance here. 

Two examples of national-level rebranding have been recently announced. I thought that one was decidedly better than the other. 

1. In Australia, something called the Nation Brand Advisory Council has urged the adoption of a logo featuring a stylized wattle, Australia’s national flower, with “AU” superimposed over it. 

Brand New.

Other variants of this logo may be seen at Brand New, where we also read the Council’s statement:

We love our kangaroo – it is currently the most internationally recognized shortcut to Australia. But we considered whether it would shift perception of our nation, or simply reinforce what people already knew about us.

Further, to adopt a kangaroo as our national symbol would require agreement on a new single ‘roo’ (by all agencies currently using kangaroos) as dual-branding situations of multiple kangaroos sitting side by side will not work. Therefore, with consideration for the mark to co-exist with existing national symbols, this led to a recommendation against the kangaroo.

New Brand Mark: The council’s preference for the Nation Brand mark was the wattle – it’s our national flower and while not immediately recognizable internationally, it will become so over time.

Our proposed Nation Brand mark balances a literal and abstract interpretation of a wattle flower. It’s an optimistic burst of gold positivity. Co-created with our indigenous design partners Balarinji, the mark is embedded with a cultural richness and graphic voice that speaks distinctively of Australia.  

I don’t really know what’s going on here. What body is this new wattle mark supposed to represent, exactly? Is the idea that it will replace the kangaroo eventually as a top-level national “brand” for all things Australian?

australianmade.com.au; Wikipedia.

Here are two such kangaroo logos, one for the Australian Made Campaign, the other for sports fans. The rendition on the left seems somewhat dated (like it’s representing a brand of tennis shoe c. 1985), and obviously boxing is appropriate for sports but not necessarily for trade. But it would be easy enough to come up with a new kangaroo logo, methinks, which would probably be more appealing than the proposed wattle. I like plants, but animals have personality. Moreover, this particular wattle looks like a “complex data visualization” or the results of a particle accelerator experiment – or even a coronavirus! (I also wonder if it isn’t Australia’s equivalent of favoring the protea over the springbok – the idea being that the kangaroo represents the bad old days?) 

Wikipedia.

A better rendition of the flower can be seen in the Golden Wattle Flag, one in a long list of proposed Australian flags. The seven petals (representing the six states plus the Northern Territory) form a seven-pointed Commonwealth Star, familiar from the current flag and from the crest in the national coat of arms. If a wattle is absolutely required, this one is probably a better choice!

2. The Icelandic Football Association (Knattspyrnusamband Íslands) has unveiled a new logo. Previously it was this, which was used both by the Association itself and by the national teams:

Logos-download.com.

I like the stylized rendition of Iceland’s flag, but sports teams don’t actually need allusions to the sport itself in their logos. Thus I like the KSI’s new, ball-less wordmark it adopted earlier this year, and I especially like the logo it has just prescribed for its teams:

Brand New.

This is perhaps a little too complex for a team logo, but it is certainly aesthetically appealing in its way, and is most appropriate to Iceland: it’s a stylized rendition of the four supporters that surround Iceland’s coat of arms.

Wikipedia.

At first glance these supporters are the four living beings of Revelation 4:7, later used to identify the authors of the each of four gospels, but note that the coat of arms has a dragon instead of St. Mark’s lion. That is because the four supporters are in fact the (pagan) Landvættir, i.e. the four traditional protectors of Iceland. According to Wikipedia:

The bull (Griðungur) is the protector of northwestern Iceland, the eagle or griffin (Gammur) protects northeastern Iceland, the dragon (Dreki) protects the southeastern part, and the rock-giant (Bergrisi) is the protector of southwestern Iceland. 

One small problem with the logo is noted by an Icelandic-expert friend, who comments:

I love this new logo, though they’ve got the wights out of order. The only one that is appropriately placed is dreki – the rest don’t map onto the areas that they are supposed to protect.

A good point, but forgivable, I think, if it means that the Landvættir can all fit together in such an awesome way. Well done, Iceland!

Revanche!

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Here is an amusing story that serves as a riposte to Monsieur Eaton and his treatment of a youthful Roch Carrier (hat tip: David Winter):

Tania Levesque.

Pastry Chef Disappoints Toronto Maple Leafs Fan with Maple Leaf Foods Cake

Canadians from coast-to-coast are getting a giggle today out of what might be the funniest cake decorating fail since someone mistook graduation “cap” for actual “cat.”

The tale begins in Mascouche, Quebec, where the parents of a young sports fan named Jacob started planning his eighth birthday party.

Knowing that Jacob loves nothing more than hockey — and, in particular, the NHL’s Toronto Maple Leafs — his parents planned a party at a Montreal arena and put in an order in for a custom cake bearing the Maple Leafs logo.

The boy’s stepmother, Tania Levesque, posted a photo of the finished product on Facebook Saturday evening.

“So Jacob was asking for a Toronto Maple Leafs cake for his birthday. The Pastry Chef of course was on google to find the logo but didn’t write… from Toronto,” wrote Levesque in her post, which has since been shared nearly 1,500 times.

“So this party is sponsored by the cold meats.”

That’s right: The baker confused Maple Leafs —Toronto’s NHL team — with Maple Leaf — one of Canada’s largest packaged meat brands.

Jacob’s father picked up the cake while en route to his son’s birthday party this weekend, but didn’t get a chance to look inside the box until he got there, according to CBC Montreal.

While shocked and confused by what they saw on the cake, the boy’s parents laughed off the silly mistake and served it anyway.

When asked what happened, Levesque told the CBC that the unnamed bakery she went to didn’t have a Toronto Maple Leafs stencil on hand. She suggested they simply Google the logo and put it on Jacob’s cake.

Something seems to have been lost in translation along the way, but kids attending the party ate the cold cut-themed cake all the same —  except for Jacob, who Levesque said refused to try it.

Some might say, as a Maple Leafs fan in Quebec, that the boy had it coming.

Apparently Maple Leaf meats have furnished Jacob with tickets to see the hockey team. 

Cake Wrecks is an entire website devoted to “professional cakes going horribly wrong.” Here is the “cake that started it all“:

Cake Wrecks.

South Africa

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Congratulations to South Africa, whose national rugby team defeated England’s this morning in Japan to win the William Webb Ellis trophy, i.e. rugby’s World Cup. A post in celebration, featuring (what else?!) South African symbols.

Wikipedia.

South Africa has a pretty cool flag, which was adopted in 1994 as symbolic of the new political dispensation in that country. I knew the designer, Frederick Brownell, who sadly died earlier this year. He wrote that: “The unique central design of the flag, which begins as a ‘V’ at the flagpost and comes together in the centre of the flag, extending further, as a single horizontal band to the outer edge of the fly, can be seen as representing the convergence of diverse elements in South African society.” The colors (black, blue, green, “chilli red,” gold, and silver) have no set meaning, however, since “individual colours can have widely differing meanings for different people” and thus “may be interpreted freely” – although clearly black, gold and green are the colors of the African National Congress, and “chilli red” (halfway between orange and red) can represent the orange and red that have appeared in the Dutch and Dutch-derived flags that have historically flown over the country.

Wikipedia.

South Africa’s old flag, which waved over the Union, and then the Republic, of South Africa from 1928 to 1994, is almost universally known as the “Apartheid flag” and is not seen flying much these days. In fact, South Africa’s Equality Court recently ruled that public displays of this flag now amount to hate speech, except for certain cases of “journalistic, academic, and artistic expression.” The flag was the (originally) orange, white and blue flag of the Netherlands, with the central band showing the flags of the three combatants in the Boer War: the United Kingdom, and the two Boer republics of the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (ZAR, or the Transvaal). These little flags were supposedly arranged in such a way that no flag had precedence over any other, and as you might expect this design was a compromise between the English and Afrikaners, reached after great rancor in 1928. Even those extremists who want their own Afrikaner Volkstaat aren’t likely to fly this flag, since the existence of the Union Jack on it has always annoyed them!

Wikipedia.

South Africa’s coat of arms underwent a similar transformation in 2000. The current coat of arms features central shield with two red-ochre Khoisan figures greeting each other. Other elements include elephant tusks, ears of wheat, a crossed spear and knobkierie, a protea flower, a secretary bird, and a Khoisan motto meaning “diverse people unite.” 

I confess that I like SA’s previous coat of arms better, if only because it’s more properly heraldic. The shield features an amalgamation of symbols representing the four South African colonies that were united and granted dominion status in 1910: the Cape Colony, Natal, the Orange Free State, and the Transvaal. But it’s more European than African in form, and since South Africa is now divided into nine provinces, its symbolism is also obsolete. 

Wikipedia.

South Africa’s parliament got its own emblem in the same style as the new coat of arms in 2007. A drum rises out of a protea flower, which is ensigned by a sun and rests on a book. The sun represents healing the divisions of the past and improving the quality of life for South Africans. The drum calls parliament to order, and the book at the bottom represents the constitution, whose initial words “We, the People” are prominently displayed.

Wikipedia.

The parliamentary emblem replaced one that had been in use since 1964, which featured (I believe) South Africa’s parliamentary mace crossed with its Black Rod mace, between the old coat of arms and the crest. (Needless to say, these maces have been updated too.)

Finally, we have the emblem of the team itself. South Africa’s national rugby team is known as the Springboks, and its logo is a leaping springbok. 

Wikipedia.

The logo appears on most things associated with the team… except for the front left of their jerseys. Like the flag, the coat of arms, and the parliamentary maces, the springbok, to many people, is representative of the old ways. Until 1994 the team was by policy all-white, and the ANC, which took power that year, saw the springbok as symbolic of this. If you’ve seen the movie Invictus (2009), you’ll be familiar with the story of how the sports ministry wanted to replace the rugby team’s springbok with the king protea, South Africa’s national flower, and how Nelson Mandela, in an attempt at reaching out to South Africa’s white population, personally intervened to prevent it. When South Africa won the World Cup at home in 1995, Mandela donned a springbok jersey to present the Webb Ellis trophy to the team captain Francois Pienaar. It was a great moment in post-Apartheid reconciliation. 

Telegraph.co.uk.

Classicrugbyshirts.com

You’ll notice, though, that the jersey at the time featured a springbok leaping through a wreath of protea flowers.

JG

The Springboks’ jerseys from 1999 also featured a protea in addition to its namesake bovid. (The photograph is from a replica jersey in our possession.) Clearly the team was trying to do its own outreach. 

Wikipedia.

The protea-springbok device was in use as late as 2007.

Footballkitnews.com.

But the ANC did not give up, and by the World Cup of 2011 it finally prevailed. With Mandela out of the picture, the party could finally force the team to decorate the fronts of its jerseys with the protea alone, although you’ll notice a small springbok on the left sleeve.

Wikipedia.

The team’s jerseys for this year’s tournament follow the same pattern – protea device on the front left of the jersey, springbok on the left sleeve. 

The South African.

Although for the Rugby Championship this year the springbok was on the front of the jersey, along with the protea (and a shirt sponsorship – can’t let any revenue escape!). As you can also see, the team is racially integrated these days – the photo is of Herschel Jantjies, a coloured scrum-half from Stellenbosch, who was one of ten non-whites on the thirty-one man World Cup squad. 

It’s nice that the springbok has not been entirely effaced. But whatever the symbol, there’s no arguing with success. Congratulations, South Africa! 

Rome

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Yesterday we enjoyed some local tourism with a visit to nearby Rome, Georgia. 

For the first time ever we went to see Rome’s characteristic building: The Clock Tower, which crowns Neely Hill, one of Rome’s Seven Hills, and which is reproduced on the city’s flag, the city’s logo, and this storm drain cover:

Actually, I think that custom cast-iron drain covers are an under-appreciated medium, and I’m pleased to discover, after a little Internet searching, that there exist fans of them.  

I’m edified to see that Rome’s Capitoline Wolf still stands outside the courthouse. That it was a gift of Benito Mussolini does not seem to bother people.

“To Robert Battey master surgeon and illustrious pioneer in medicine by the people of Georgia and others who know his worth.”

Also in front of the courthouse, a monument to Robert Battey, M.D. Wikipedia says:

After the Confederate surrender in April 1865, Battey resumed his practice in Rome, Georgia. His field of study was gynecology, and he became well known for a procedure he pioneered to remove a woman’s ovaries. Initially referred to as ovariotomy, and named “Battey’s Operation” in his honor, it is what today is termed a radical oophorectomy. He performed the first successful oophorectomy in May 1869 when he successfully removed a large dermoid cyst from a physician’s wife. On August 27, 1872 he performed his first ‘normal’ oophorectomy. The patient, Julie Omberg, had diseased ovaries and lived to be 80 years old. There was a lynch mob waiting for Dr. Battey if he failed the operation.

I think that a [citation needed] note ought to follow that final sentence…

Nearby, a monument to Admiral John Henry Towers, who was born and raised in Rome. Wikipedia:

Towers was a United States Navy admiral and pioneer naval aviator. He made important contributions to the technical and organizational development of naval aviation from its beginnings, eventually serving as Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics (1939–1942). He commanded carrier task forces during World War II, and retired in December 1947…. He was the first naval aviator to achieve flag rank and was the most senior advocate for naval aviation during a time when the Navy was dominated by battleship admirals. 

Further along on Broad Street: a monument to Von Albade Gammon and his mother Rosalind Burns Gammon. The plaques speak for themselves:

This is an interesting situation, which was echoed a few years later on a national level during the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt. From a History Channel article on the subject:

At the turn of the 20th century, America’s football gridirons were killing fields. The college game drew tens of thousands of spectators and rivaled professional baseball in fan appeal, but football in the early 1900s was lethally brutal—a grinding, bruising sport in which the forward pass was illegal and brute strength was required to move the ball. Players locked arms in mass formations and used their helmetless heads as battering rams. Gang tackles routinely buried ball carriers underneath a ton and a half of tangled humanity.

With little protective equipment, players sustained gruesome injuries—wrenched spinal cords, crushed skulls and broken ribs that pierced their hearts. The Chicago Tribune reported that in 1904 alone, there were 18 football deaths and 159 serious injuries, mostly among prep school players. Obituaries of young pigskin players ran on a nearly weekly basis during the football season. The carnage appalled America. Newspaper editorials called on colleges and high schools to banish football outright. “The once athletic sport has degenerated into a contest that for brutality is little better than the gladiatorial combats in the arena in ancient Rome,” opined the Beaumont Express. The sport reached such a crisis that one of its biggest boosters—President Theodore Roosevelt—got involved.

Although his nearsightedness kept him off the Harvard varsity squad, Roosevelt was a vocal exponent of football’s contribution to the “strenuous life,” both on and off the field. As New York City police commissioner, he helped revive the annual Harvard-Yale football series after it had been canceled for two years following the violent 1894 clash that was deemed “the bloodbath at Hampden Park.” His belief that the football field was a proving ground for the battlefield was validated by the performance of his fellow Rough Riders who were former football standouts. “In life, as in a football game,” he wrote, “the principle to follow is: Hit the line hard; don’t foul and don’t shirk, but hit the line hard!” In 1903, the president told an audience, “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.”

Of course, it was fatal, and Roosevelt himself supported rule changes that eliminated mass formations and legalized the forward pass, which was introduced in 1906. But he was absolutely determined that football should not be played “on too ladylike a basis,” given that colleges should turn out “vigorous men” and not “mollycoddles,” because “the weakling and the coward are out of place in a strong and free community” (see Kevin Murphy’s Political Manhood for more). 

I can’t imagine even Trump saying such things…

But the controversy lives on, in its way. Perhaps you have heard of Chronic traumatic encephalopathy, that is, brain damage sustained by professional football players over the course of their careers, and which has led to calls for football to be banned, or radically changed. So far no one, to my knowledge, has stood up for “manliness” and “vigor” as positive virtues that football might instill. Instead, people try to question the very existence of CTE (a physician I know claims that it is a “lawyer’s disease”). I spotted Brainwashed in a bookstore later in the day. 

Rome’s Myrtle Hill Cemetery, as you might expect, features a prominent Confederate memorial, erected by the N.B. Forrest Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in honor of their namesake.

I thought that Forrest had more of a connection with Tennessee but he saw action in north Georgia as well. From the plinth:

On Sunday, May 3rd, 1863, Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, by his indomitable will, after a running fight of three days and nights, with 410 men, captured Col. A.D. Streight’s raiders, numbering 1600, thereby saving Rome from destruction.

A nearby historical marker elaborates:

GEORGIA’S PAUL REVERE

Along this road John H. Wisdom rode from Gadsden, Ala. to warn that a Federal force of over 2,00 men was approaching Rome to occupy the town, destroy foundries making ammunition for the Confederates and to cut Confederate communications (May 2, 1863).

On Wisdom’s arrival in Rome the bridge over the Oostanaula river was fortified and made ready for burning as a last resort. Widsom’s warning and the plans for defense played a big part in the surrender of Col. Streight with 1,500 men to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest with only 425 men.

People always claim that Forrest was a “brilliant general,” but will this monument survive his connection to Fort Pillow and the Ku Klux Klan? 

Either way, it would be good to put up a monument to Bud Rufus somewhere in Myrtle Hill. 

Parallel to the Forrest monument is another monument, this one to the Women of the Confederacy, with the twin sculptures “News from the Front” and “An Angel of Mercy,” along with the usual doggerel.

Around the corner, the graves of some 368 Civil War soldiers. 

Cymru Am Byth!

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Congratulations to Wales, whose national rugby team defeated Ireland Saturday 25-7 to win the Guinness Six Nations Championship. The other teams in this tournament represent France, England, Scotland, and Italy, and over the past few weekends Wales defeated them all, earning a perfect 5-0 record (a “Grand Slam“). This is their twelfth such achievement over the history of the tournament, which began as the Home Nations Tournament in 1883.

Most people don’t think about Wales all that much; the joke is that if you look up “Wales” in the index it will say “Wales: see England.” It’s true, since the reign of King Edward I (1277-1307), Wales has been completely subordinated to the English crown, and its prince is usually the heir apparent to that crown. Wales enjoys much less autonomy within the UK than Scotland does. But it remains its own country with its own language and sponsors its own sports teams. And, of course, it has a plethora of symbols, which this post will revel in exploring.

Wikipedia.

The Welsh national rugby team, though, does not identify itself with any traditional Welsh national symbols. The emblem above is that of the Welsh Rugby Union and appears on the shirts of the national team. It consists of three ostrich feathers and a crown.

Wikipedia.

This device is a stylized rendition of the badge of the heir apparent to the throne of England, currently HRH Prince Charles. The heir apparent is usually also styled Prince of Wales, but it’s technically not the same thing. (The first-born son of the Sovereign is automatically the heir apparent, but he has to be created Prince of Wales.)

Wikipedia.

This is the badge of the Prince of Wales as such – the familiar Welsh Red Dragon (Y Ddraig Goch) with a white “label” of three points on its neck indicating a first-born son. There was a time in the 1990s when the Welsh rugby team marketed itself the Dragons, but that did not stick, and they have reverted to the three feathers of erroneous usage.

Wikipedia.

Both the badge of the heir apparent to the throne and the badge of the Prince of Wales appear as part of Prince Charles’s full armorial achievement, along with the arms of the Duchy of Cornwall (Sable, fifteen bezants – Charles was created Duke of Cornwall in 1952). These arms are essentially the arms of the Sovereign, with first-son white “labels” on the shield, supporters, and crest, and with an inescutcheon of the royal arms of Wales, blazoned quarterly Or and Gules, four lions passant guardant countercharged armed and langued Azure. These arms were borne by the Prince of Gwynedd Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in the thirteenth century.

Wikipedia.

Being royal arms, these aren’t used much as a national symbol by the Welsh, but they do appear on the Royal Badge of Wales, which adorns legislation passed by the Welsh Assembly. In this rendition, the royal arms are surrounded by a ribbon bearing the motto Pleidiol Wyf I’m Gwlad (“True I am to my country”), and by plant badges for England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, which is represented twice, by the leek.

Reverse of a pound coin from 1985 with leek for Wales. Author’s collection.

Reverse, pound coin from 2018, featuring a rose, leek, thistle, and shamrock, for England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Wikipedia.

Why the leek? Wikipedia says that:

According to one legend, King Cadwaladr of Gwynedd ordered his soldiers to identify themselves by wearing the vegetable on their helmets in an ancient battle against the Saxons that took place in a leek field. The Elizabethan poet Michael Drayton stated, in contrast, that the tradition was a tribute to Saint David, who ate only leeks when he was fasting.

Shakespeare, in Henry V, has the Welsh officer Fluellen say:

Your majesty says very true: if your majesty is remembered of it, the Welshmen did good service in a garden where leeks did grow, wearing leeks in their Monmouth caps; which, your majesty know, to this hour is an honourable badge of the service; and I do believe your majesty takes no scorn to wear the leek upon Saint Tavy’s day.

So who is St. David? The patron saint of Wales, of course. He was active in the sixth century when, as bishop of Mynyw, he founded churches and monasteries, performed several miracles, and spoke eloquently against Pelagianism. His feast day on March 1 is a day of celebration in Wales, and its calendrical timing is responsible for another Welsh national symbol, the daffodil, which is usually starting to appear by then. Welsh rugby fans often wear daffodil bonnets to the match (click the links; I couldn’t find any photographs that weren’t copyrighted).

Wikipedia.

One more symbol of St. David: his flag, a gold cross on black. This one only dates back to the 1990s, and was formed as a parallel to the Cornish cross of St. Piran (a white cross on black, which is a reference to Piran’s alleged rediscovery of tin smelting). The arms of the diocese of St. David’s are Sable, on a cross Or, five cinquefoils of the first which suggested this color scheme.

Wikipedia.

But of all the symbols of Wales, the most familiar one is the red dragon, which appears on the country’s flag. It is the alleged emblem of Cadwalader, king of Gwynedd in the seventh century. Green and white are the Tudor colours, and a red dragon on a green and white field was apparently flown at the Battle of Bosworth field in 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III and was subsequently crowned King Henry VII. From that point on, and particularly from the 1950s when it was rediscovered, the Welsh have been proud to fly their red dragon flag. 

The Hockey Sweater

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If Hugh McLennan’s Two Solitudes is the Great Canadian Novel, then Roch Carrier’s The Hockey Sweater is the Great Canadian Children’s Story. Both works deal with Canada’s national obsessions: the cultural divide between English and French Canada, and the great sport of ice hockey. The Hockey Sweater is regularly shown as an animated short around Christmas time on the CBC, and the opening lines appeared on the back of the “Canadian Journey” series $5 bill.

In case you don’t know about it, here’s the Coles Notes version, with some photographed illustrations from the book:

In the winter of 1946, all of us boys in the small town of Ste-Justine, Québec, were obsessed with Maurice “Rocket” Richard, number 9 for the Montréal Canadiens. We all wore his sweater when we played, taped our sticks like him, knew all his stats, and even combed our hair like him, which we held in place with a kind of glue.

One day my mother decided that my sweater was too small for me, and wrote away to “Monsieur Eaton” for a new one. A hockey sweater did indeed arrive two weeks later, but it was not a Canadiens’ sweater – it was a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater.

My mother refused to insult M. Eaton by sending it back, so I had to wear it when I played hockey.

I was picked last, no one would pass me the puck, and in frustration I broke my stick, and was sent to the church to pray for forgiveness by the priest-cum-referee. There, I prayed that a million moths would come and devour my Maple Leafs sweater.

Whether the mix-up with the sweater was accidental or deliberate is an issue in Canadian literary criticism. The narrator’s mother eschewed the order forms for the T. Eaton Co. catalogue because “they were written in English and she did not understand a single word of it.” Instead, she wrote a letter “as she always did” in French, in her “fine schoolteacher’s hand,” making a polite request, and including some chit-chat about how her son is growing up so quickly. Was the reply thus an insult to someone was wasn’t following the rules, and who had expected that this Anglophone company operate in French? Or was it a case whereby someone tried to read the letter, saw that it was asking for something to do with hockey, and sent what he thought they were asking for – or was it some other situation not attributable to malice but to stupidity? (Although note that she did ask specifically for a Canadiens’ sweater – it wasn’t just a misunderstanding about what “hockey sweater” she was asking for – and she had written letters before, and presumably had had goods delivered satisfactorily.)

But whatever the cause, the company certainly screwed up, and in a culturally insensitive way. The boy’s mother refused to send it back because, as she explained:

If you don’t keep this sweater which fits you perfectly I’ll have to write to Monsieur Eaton and explain that you don’t want to wear the Toronto sweater. Monsieur Eaton understands French perfectly, but he’s English and he’s going to be insulted because he likes the Maple Leafs. If he’s insulted, do you think he’ll be in a hurry to answer us? Spring will come before you play a single game, just because you don’t want to wear that nice blue sweater.

She is an interesting figure. She doesn’t want her neighbours thinking that her family is poor and can’t afford new clothes, and believes that the English-Canadian T. Eaton Co. is the only place good enough to acquire them. Yet she has an attitude toward this commercial enterprise of deference and personal connection – she actually writes to the president of the company, and refuses to return the wrong sweater lest it offend him! (I assume that she is not just spinning a yarn to her boy because she can’t be bothered to return it – she wrote to “M. Eaton” in the first place, and clearly thinks of him as a patron of sorts.) It seems an odd combination of snobbery and naïveté.

Thus, one can see how Roch Carrier is criticizing this strain of French Canadian culture, the “respectable” people who convey their respectability through the consumption of Anglophone goods or the admiration of powerful Anglophone figures. (Or, at the very least, he is criticizing parents who refuse to take their kids’ social lives seriously – it might seem trivial to you, but it is a big deal to your kid, and for good reason.) At the same time, Carrier seemingly criticizes the cultural uniformity and religiously-sanctioned xenophobia that pervaded French Canada, given how everyone dressed the same, and how the main character really did lose caste for wearing the sweater of the rival team, both in the eyes of his peers and in the eyes of his priest. (This was also an element in Two Solitudes, if I’m not misremembering.)

Now, if this story is autobiographical, it would be interesting to know what actually transpired in Ste-Justine in the winter of 1946. A photograph on Wikipedia shows Carrier as a boy, wearing his Maple Leafs sweater and not looking particularly embarrassed. Was it really that gauche? I would also be curious to know about the T. Eaton Co. in the 1940s. According to Wikipedia, they printed their catalogues in French, customers could order in French, and they had a policy of “goods satisfactory or money refunded.” What was the reaction of the company when The Hockey Sweater was first published in 1979, I wonder? (Unfortunately, it is no longer with us, and so has no one to defend it.)*

For all its delightfulness, The Hockey Sweater is a rather pessimistic book.

This is why I was happy to discover recently another children’s book, entitled My Leafs Sweater, by Mike Leonetti, first published in 1998. It is billed as an “homage à” Roch Carrier, but it is perhaps a riposte to him also. The hero of this one is not Maurice Richard, but Darryl Sittler, the 1970s-era Toronto Maple Leaf captain and hockey great.

Note the reproduction of Lawren Harris‘s The Old Stump, Lake Superior on the wall to the right, for that extra dollop of Canadian Content.

Coles Notes summary:

I loved cheering for the Toronto Maple Leafs while watching Hockey Night in Canada, in particular for Daryl Sittler, my favourite player. I had some Leafs memorabilia, but I didn’t have a sweater, so I asked for one for my birthday. My parents demurred, given how expensive they are, but told me that if I behaved myself they’d get me one. Come my birthday, my dad and I went to a sporting goods store, which was sold out of Leaf sweaters, then to a store in the mall, which was also sold out, then to Maple Leaf Gardens itself, which did have them, but they were all too big. Fortunately, there were tickets available for that night’s game, and my dad and I got to see the Leafs and Sittler in person! As it happens, the game was the historic 11-4 Maple Leaf victory over the Boston Bruins on February 7, 1976, in which Sittler tallied 10 points, a record that still stands. So I never got my sweater, but I did have a great story that I could tell my friends, and a memory to last forever.

A friend of mine in college couldn’t understand why you would name a team the “Leafs” – at least they should be the “Leaves,” she thought. But our boy is wise beyond his years:

The Maple Leafs sweater was special. It wasn’t like the others. It didn’t have a lot of strange colours, just blue and white. It didn’t have an animal on it like a seal or a penguin. I just couldn’t picture those animals playing hockey. And I didn’t understand how a flame or a king or a sabre had anything to do with hockey.

But I’d seen maple leaves with my own eyes, frozen in the ice below my skates, trapped there until spring. They had something to do with skating and seeing your breath on a cold day. Maple leaves turning colour meant the start of the hockey season, a sign that winter was coming.

The maple leaf on the sweater stood out because it was simple and true, just like the leaves on the tree in front of our house. I could also see a bid red maple leaf in the middle of the Canadian flag out in front of my school. It meant something to everybody, even to the people who were new to this country.

The section that most clearly references Carrier’s book:

I had a poster of Darryl Sittler and an autographed photo of him on my bedroom wall. I knew how many goals he had scored and how many points and assists he had.** I had a collection of all his hockey cards since he began playing for the Leafs. I had a hockey stick like his, and I even taped it the way he did.

He doesn’t hold his hair in place like Sittler’s with a kind of glue, but it was the 1970s and that sort of thing was out of fashion. “Taping the stick” in a certain way is the clearest reference. (How can you possibly tell how someone tapes his stick, anyway? I can’t think of more than one way myself….)

Dig the Atlanta Flames and antique Los Angeles Kings sweaters.

But the clearest reference to team (and inter-Canadian) rivalry is this exchange in the mall sports store:

“Sold out,” the storekeeper said. He held up a Canadiens sweater. “What about this one?”

I could see there was going to be a problem. Either you loved the Leafs or you didn’t understand.

I folded my arms and looked away. “No,” I said. “It’s not the same.”

I appreciate how the possibility of wearing the rival team’s sweater is not cast as an existential crisis, like it is in Carrier’s book. Even though the Canadiens were a powerhouse in the 1970s, and the Leafs haven’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967, I love the self-assurance on display here – his sentiments are pro-Leaf, not anti-Canadien. For the sake of the story, indeed, it could have been any other team’s sweater – and, indeed, all the kid’s friends have different team sweaters on when they play, including a Montréal Canadiens one! It seems that English Canada had a little more tolerance for individuality – a privilege of being the dominant culture, I guess.

* My dad informs me that, in the mid-twentieth century, Eaton’s had a great reputation in most parts of Canada, that their policy of unconditional returns was abused quite frequently – e.g. people would wear their boots all winter, and then return them in the spring claiming they didn’t quite fit. (A friend of mine called this move a “Sears rental” for another department store, also sadly no longer with us.) At the same time, I seem to remember that the apostrophe-s in the company’s name was offensive to Francophones, and I do remember that the bricks-and-mortar store in Montréal was simply labeled “Eaton.”

** “I knew how many goals he had scored and how many points and assists he had.” I assume the author is trying to reproduce a child’s view of things. A player’s points are his goals plus his assists.

Let’s Call it Swimming

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From History Today:

How Europe Learnt to Swim

For 1,500 years, Western Europe ‘forgot’ how to swim, retreating from the water in terror. The return to swimming is a lesser-known triumph of the Enlightenment.

Humans first learned to swim in prehistory – though how far back remains a matter of debate between the paleoanthropological establishment and the followers of Elaine Morgan (1920-2013), who championed the aquatic ape hypothesis, an aquatic phase during hominid evolution between 7 and 4.3 million years ago. Even though we may never have had an aquatic ancestor, compelling evidence exists for the swimming abilities of the representatives of the genus Homo since H. erectus, who appeared some 1.8 million years ago. In the historical period, the myths of the ancient civilisations of the eastern Mediterranean testify to a positive relationship with water and swimming, mediated until late antiquity by a pantheon of aquatic gods, nymphs and tritons.

By the medieval period, the majority of Western Europeans who were not involved in harvesting aquatic resources had forgotten how to swim. Swimming itself was not forgotten – but the ability to do so hugely decreased. Bodies of water became sinister ‘otherworlds’ populated by mermaids and sea monsters. How do we explain the loss of so important a skill? Humans have never given up running, jumping or climbing, so why did so many abandon an activity that was useful to obtain food and natural resources, vital to avoid drowning and pleasurable to cool down on a hot summer’s day?

The retreat from swimming began during late antiquity, as evidenced in the writings of the fifth-century Roman military writer, Vegetius, who bemoaned the fact that, unlike the hardy legionaries of the Republic, ‘whose only bath was the River Tiber’, the recruits of his day had become too used to the luxuries of the baths and had to be taught how to swim. Roman baths were furnished with large, shallow basins (piscinae), but these were designed for soaking and sitting and not swimming. Nevertheless, is it conceivable that the majority of the population of the Western Empire could forget how to swim? It is, if one considers the size of the urban bathhouse infrastructure and the concentration of the population living in inland cities in the late-imperial period. In 33 BC, Rome had 170 bathhouses; by late-fourth-century, that number had grown to 856.

Much more at the link, although as a friend pointed out, the Roman Empire may have been based on cities, but the vast majority of people did not live in them.

The author of this piece, Eric Chaline, wrote Strokes of Genius: A History of Swimming (Reaktion, 2017). My friend Nicholas Orme wrote a history of British swimming that I see is still in print. The post title is a lyrical reference.

Horse Racing

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Mike Huggins talks about his newly-published book Horse Racing and British Society in the Long Eighteenth Century at Proofed, a blog of Boydell and Brewer:

I had not realized how important the annual racing week was in the leisure calendar of so many county and large market towns during the eighteenth century, helping foster consumerism and the urban renaissance. For many women of the middling classes for example, the racing was almost incidental, but was looked forward to for weeks before with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. It offered many social opportunities; socializing with the titled and the county set, attending assemblies, balls, the ordinaries or the theatre, appearing in the grandstand, and dressing up, demonstrating status and conspicuous consumption.

Racing was equally significant politically. The early Jockey Club was much more than a racing club. Its members were mostly Protestant, Whig and committed to the defeat of Stuart Catholicism, and were usually MPs or otherwise leading figures in the political elite, like the Duke of Bolton. Racing played across divisions of Whig and Tory, court and country or Hanover and Jacobite in complex ways. Hanoverian sons demonstrated their independence against their father by spending money racing. Race meetings were sites of assembly for political discourse where prospective and current parliamentarians lobbied for support, exploited the dynamics of patronage, or used attenders as focus groups.

More at the link.

England at the World Cup

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So the English national football team lost yesterday in the semi-final of the World Cup. Their first goal was a thing of beauty but it came too early, giving Croatia the chance to tie the game and then score a winning goal in extra time. The English fans’ continuous chanting of “it’s coming home!” can now only apply to the third place trophy, which England will play for on Saturday against Belgium, a rematch of a pool stage game that England lost 1-0. So England, where the game was invented and which hosts the Premier League, the world’s top professional soccer league, with such monumental clubs as Manchester United, Liverpool, Chelsea, and Arsenal, must suffer yet another disappointment from their national side.

At least this time the team made it to the semi-finals. They did not exit after the pool stages like they did four years ago, they were not eliminated in the first round by Iceland like they were two years ago, and they were not sent home after losing a penalty shootout as they have done consistently since 1996. In this tournament, by contrast, they actually won a shootout (in their Round-of-16 game against Colombia), and thus have broken that particular curse.

Wikipedia.

All this wouldn’t matter nearly so much had not England won the World Cup in 1966, symbolized by the single star displayed over the team’s coat of arms. Why have they not managed to repeat this feat in the intervening half-century? What has gone wrong?! I found a Financial Times article that I thought was interesting and revealing:

Wikipedia

“Ee-aye-addio, we won the cup!” sing the crowd. England’s captain Bobby Moore climbs the steps to the royal box at Wembley, where a yellow-clad 40-year-old Queen Elizabeth hands him the little gold Jules Rimet trophy. She, he and it all look gorgeous in the London sunshine.

The Technicolor moment in 1966 when England’s football team won their only World Cup is a high point of postwar English history. It also serves as a constant reprimand to the nation’s present. National decline is a powerful notion in modern English history, and England’s failure to win a football tournament since that July day seems to sum up that decline. That’s why the English often turn 1966 into a symbol. The argument then goes that Moore’s “greatest generation” won because they were better men than today’s spoiled overpaid lot. However, if you want to understand why England won then and have lost since, symbolism doesn’t get you very far. In an attempt to demystify 1966, I read the history and crunched data.

Read the whole thing, which examines the roles of home field advantage, changes in the game, and the ever-present quality of luck, among other factors.

The Gaelic Athletic Association

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Arial view of Croke Park, from a postcard.

Entrance to Croke Park, with its name rendered in Irish and the GAA logo on the wall.

I was pleased to be able to visit Croke Park with two of my students while we were in Dublin. Named after the prominent Irish nationalist Thomas Croke, Archbishop of Cashel (1875-1902), it is the headquarters and national stadium of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which governs the Irish sports of hurling and Gaelic football. Croke Park, they claim, is the third largest stadium in Europe but the largest stadium for amateur sports in the world and, like the GAA itself, has a prominent place in Irish national history: on Sunday, November 21, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, the Royal Irish Constabulary thought it would be a great idea to go to Croke Park and shoot the place up during a Dublin-Tipperary match, in revenge for the IRA’s assassination of fifteen British intelligence officers earlier that day. At Croke Park, fourteen people were killed and over sixty wounded in what became known as the original Bloody Sunday. It was a moral victory for the IRA – whereas their operation was targeted at specific individuals, the RIC’s was indiscriminate and against civilians out enjoying themselves. One player, Michael Hogan of Tipperary, died in the event, and in 1924 a stand at Croke Park was named in his memory.

The GAA itself was founded in 1884 in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, by seven people including Michael Cusack, whose statue stands outside the main entrance to Croke Park. It was part of an international movement to codify rules for sports and to organize teams to play them, such as the National Association of Base Ball Players (1857), the Football Association (1863), the Rugby Football Union (1871), or the modern Olympic Games (1896). The Gaelic Athletic Association was set up as a specifically Irish organization. Hurling, which involves running around on a field and hitting a ball (“sliotar”) with a stick (“hurley”), has a long pedigree in Ireland – the mythological hero Cú Chulainn plays it in the medieval Ulster Cycle, and one of the Statues of Kilkenny in 1361 forbade it to English settlers.

From a postcard: “Hurling in action! Eoin Larkin from Kilkenny takes on Tipperary men Michael Cahill (left) and Paddy Stapleton (right) during the 2011 GAA Hurling All-Ireland Senior Championship Final at Croke Park.”

The hurling game that the GAA formalized ended up with fifteen men a side, a 90 by 145 meter field, and two ways of scoring (in the net for three points, over the net for one), along with various permissible ways of handling and passing the ball and of contact between opponents. Gaelic football does not have as long a history as hurling, but it was devised in tandem with modern hurling, and so deliberately uses the same size of pitch, number of players, and methods of scoring. More to the point, Gaelic football was to be different from rugby and soccer, the two other major codes of football, which were English in origin and thus morally tainted.

From a postcard: “Jumping! A general view of the action from the 1966 All-Ireland Senior Football Final between Galway and Meath at Croke Park, Dublin.”

Having now seen a Gaelic football match in Dingle, I will say that it seems to be a well-designed game. One cannot argue with the immense worldwide popularity of soccer, which is cheap to play and easy to understand, but I am reminded again in this World Cup season about Adam Gopnick’s observation that soccer:

has achieved a kind of tactical stasis. Things start off briskly and then fritter away into desultory shin-kicking, like a Wall Street Journal editorial. In soccer, the defense has too big an edge to keep the contest interesting, like basketball before the coming of the twenty-four second clock or the Western Front before the invention of the tank…

Since a defensive system keeps players from getting a decent chance to score, the idea is to get an indecent one: to draw a foul so that the referee awards a penalty, which is essentially a free goal. This creates an enormous disproportion between the foul and the reward… The customary method is to walk into the “area” with the ball, get breathed on hard, and then immediately collapse, like a man shot by a sniper, arms and legs splayed out, while you twist in agony and beg for morphine, and your teammates smite their heads at the tragic waste of a young life. The referee buys this more often than you think.

More fundamentally, as Steve Sailer notes:

There’s a cost to abjuring the use of the opposable thumb: competence. While the average National Basketball Association team sinks three dozen field goals per 48-minute game, the all-star squads in the knockout rounds of the 2002 World Cup averaged less than one goal per 90-minute game. The reason soccer so often seems like an exercise in futility is that it’s played with the wrong part of the anatomy.

Rugby (founded, according to legend, by William Webb Ellis, who “in a fine disregard for the rules of football, picked up the ball and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the game of rugby football”) does not have this problem, but it is immensely more complicated – I played the sport in high school and have been watching it for years, and even now I have to have the commentators explaining its minutia to me. Moreover, the trouble with rugby right now is that it is too easy to commit penalties. Often you simply can’t prevent going over the top of the ruck, or collapsing the scrum – and, like soccer, there is a disproportion between the foul and the consequence, since a penalty equals a kick for the other team and thus a pretty good chance for them to score three points. England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003 by a strategy of advancing into the other team’s end, drawing a penalty, and getting Jonny Wilkinson to convert it. 

Gaelic football thus seems like the sport that Goldilocks chose. Players can pick up the ball with their hands, and run with it, although every four steps they have to kick it back up to themselves, or bounce it off the ground. They can pass the ball by hand, but only by holding it in one hand and hitting it with the other (a feature shared with Australian Rules Football if I’m not mistaken). They can kick it along the ground and at the goal as in soccer if they wish. Rugby-style tackling is not allowed, but shoulder-to-shoulder body checking certainly is, and as a consequence there is a minimum of play-acting. Forward passing by hand is allowed, and thus there are no knock-ons like in rugby, and there are no offsides, meaning that the game is open in way that soccer or rugby aren’t (my brother-in-law insists that the key to improving soccer is to get rid of the offside rule). Our guide at Croke Park, a hurling man himself, did claim that Gaelic football is currently dominated by the defense, but that is not the impression I got in Dingle, whose junior team lost to Ballyduff by a total score of 22-21.

From a postcard: “Arthur Griffith, Eamonn de Valera, Lord Mayor Laurence O’Neill and Michael Collins at Croke Park for the 1919 All-Ireland Senior Hurling final between Cork (6-04) and Dublin (2-04), 21 September 1919.”

It’s a shame this sport is not more popular, but something tells me that the Irish wouldn’t want it that way. The GAA was, and remains, very much a nationalist organization. In addition to promoting indigenous sports, it set itself the task of promoting the Irish language, Irish dance, and Irish music. In the late nineteenth century the organization was infiltrated by members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who recruited through it. During the War of Independence, apparently some GAA teams were simply front organizations for IRA units, and in response at some point the British banned the playing of Gaelic sports, something that the Irish happily ignored in a coordinated effort. (As late as the 1980s, numerous county GAA boards supported the IRA and INLA hunger strikers in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland.)

Thomas Ashe (1885-1917), member of the Gaelic League, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and the Irish Volunteers, and namesake of the Dingle GAA grounds. Ashe died in police custody in 1917.

But the GAA did some banning of its own: from 1897, members of the Royal Irish Constabulary were forbidden from joining the organization (Rule 21), and from 1901, GAA members were forbidden from taking part in or even watching non-Gaelic games (Rule 27). The most famous victim of this policy was Douglas Hyde, who in his capacity as Ireland’s first president, attended an Ireland-Poland soccer match in Dublin in 1937, and who was subsequently removed as patron of the GAA! I saw a book about this episode in a shop at Inch Strand. This does seem a bit self-righteous and psychologically insecure.

Since then both Rule 21 and Rule 27 have been abolished, and even Rule 42, which prohibits GAA grounds from being used to play “garrison games,” has been relaxed. When Lansdowne Road, the Irish national stadium for rugby and soccer, was being redeveloped over the period 2007-2010, the GAA graciously allowed the Ireland rugby team to play its home games in Croke Park, including against England. A sculpture in honor of this event greeted us as we arrived at Shannon Airport.

“Saturday 24th February 2007 Ireland v England, Croke Park, Dublin. ‘The Day that Changed Ireland.’ Rugby lineout featuring Paul O’Connell, Donnacha O’Callaghan and John Hayes. Sculpture by Paddy Campbell, February 2015.”

Our guide at Croke Park said that some people protested this game outside the stadium, but that there was dead silence for the playing of “God Save the Queen” before the match, indicating a certain maturity on the part of the Irish. I suppose it helped that Ireland handily won the match, 43-13, although I would be curious to know what the reaction would have been if Croke Park had been filled with fans of the GAA, and not the IRFU.

Paddy Bawn Brosnan‘s Bar and Lounge, Dingle. Brosnan was Co. Kerry senior Gaelic football captain, 1937-52.

Statue of famed Gaelic football player and manager Páidí Ó Sé (Paddy O’Shea), outside his eponymous pub in Ventry, Co. Kerry.

Painting of a hurling player, Falls Road, Belfast.

Apart from the politics, it does seem that the GAA is something that binds the country together. The organization remains amateur, with all the romance that this entails, and it is organized by county, the fundamental subunit of the Irish state. The sports, I discover, are very popular – people walk around in replica jerseys, and county colors fly from pubs and from private homes.

County banners, GAA Museum, Croke Park, Dublin.

The museum is pretty good too. I did not recognize anyone in the GAA hall of fame, but the exhibits on the history of the organization are well done, and a visitor can even get the opportunity to see how hard he can hit a sliotar with a hurley (I kept missing it, to my students’ mirth).

Outside Croke Park: GAA club logos by county.