I read Frank Guridy’s new book while watching the U.S. play Serbia in the Olympic basketball game. Serbia was up by 13 with ten minutes to go, but the Americans pulled off a convincing win. The Serbs looked tired in the final quarter, which makes sense given that the American team had so much depth; playing the U.S. would be like playing two top teams that each get to rest for half the game.

The game felt entirely non-political, despite it being an international competition between two countries that were at war with each other a few decades ago. That and the potential racial angle (a team of white Europeans vs. a team of African Americans) didn’t seem to come up, maybe because these guys played together in the NBA, maybe because white basketball players are kind of considered honorary black people, maybe because everyone was looking forward to seeing LeBron, Steph, etc., playing together. Actually, this whole Olympics has felt non-political, except for some occasional efforts by online rabble-rousers to stir up controversies that nobody else seemed to care much about.

I say all this because Guridy’s book on American stadiums, like his earlier “The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics,” is all about sports and politics—and in some ways the Olympics has been right there at the nexus. In recent decades, though—since the U.S. and Soviet boycotts of 1980 and 1984, I’d say—the controversies about the Olympics have been about economics (public funding, etc.), performance-enhancing drugs, and various aspects of sports itself. Guridy does talk a bit about the 1984 L.A. Olympics as a step in the corporate funding and branding of sports, but not about the Olympics as a political stage. National and ideological conflicts are not an Olympic thing anymore. The cold war is over, and now it’s much more about the sports and the fun.

The other thing this all made me think about was how minor the role of stadiums is in sports. When I play sports, it’s on fields and courts, not in stadiums. When I coach sports, again, no stadiums. And almost all the sports watching I do is on TV. The games take place in stadiums, and that does make a difference somehow—watching a game without fans is like watching a game on tape delay: in theory it shouldn’t make much of a difference but in practice it doesn’t feel quite real—, but as a TV watcher I don’t really care where the stadium is, what it looks like, how it’s branded, who paid for it, etc. I mean, sure, I care a little bit—I hate to see tax dollars wasted, etc.—but it’s not something that comes up when watching the game in the way that it’s apparent if you’re going and watching it live.

So, most of sports is not about stadiums. In his book, Guridy points out that much of stadiums is not about sports. We associate stadiums with sports competitions, but lots of other things get done at these places. Yankee Stadium is only used for its primary purpose on 81 days of the year (a few more if they make the playoffs) and just for a few hours each day. Guridy writes that “the stadium has never been merely a sports facility”:

The association between stadiums and sports is understandable. Americans have gathered at these facilities to watch and participate in sporting events, concerts, the circus, and a host of other cultural events for more than a century. They have congregated outside these facilities to tailgate, sell tickets, hawk merchandise, and sell food. Like cathedrals, these places are where rituals take place on and off the field.

Some notable non-sporting events at stadiums discussed by Guridy include the 1972 Wattstax concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum, Colin Kaepernick’s protest in 2017, various racist halftime and pregame activities at the Sugar Bowl and RFK stadium in bygone decades, and the notorious Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in 1989. Not to mention all the non-athletic effort needed to situate, design, finance, build, operate, and maintain these structures. Those of us who are sports fans tend to think of the stadiums of our youths as just existing, part of the human landscape. We don’t always think about where they came from and the historical contingencies involved.

The book resonates with Jane Jacobs’s idea of multi-use structures and neighborhoods. Consider the massive concrete structures built in 1950s and 1960s—Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, the Oakland Coliseum, Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh, and all the rest. Guridy thinks these were unappreciated:

Starting with the Los Angeles Sports Arena in 1959 and continuing to the end of the decade with the opening of the new Madison Square Garden in 1968, futuristic buildings designed to cater to the public’s growing interest in basketball, hockey, and rock concerts appeared in various cities and suburbs. The vast majority of arenas and stadiums built in the 1960s were publicly controlled structures that were compelled to cater to a wider constituency than followers of baseball, the fan base of which was declining as other sports and forms of entertainment grew increasingly popular. These buildings were also governed by public entities, such as the DC Armory Board, which, however corrupt, were compelled to fill seats for a wide variety of events. Baseball purists criticized the “concrete donuts” of the 1960s on aesthetic grounds, but the buildings that popped up in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Diego, Atlanta, and Houston drew crowds from across society, even as they were meant to draw customers from the car-driving suburban populations. As Daniel Rosensweig perceptively noted, the so-called multipurpose suburban ballpark of the sixties and seventies was more inclusive than the stadiums that were built in downtown areas after the nineties: “Cheap tickets, wide public concourses, and a lack of segregated seating enabled an unprecedented degree of fan diversity and mixing. . . .

Because the vast majority of facilities were publicly managed, stadium and arena managers were reluctant to allow an excessive number of corporate billboards inside. Advertisements were relegated to scoreboards. The ad-free walls then served as blank canvases for fans to adorn with homemade signs and banners, at the encouragement of team management. Indeed, the 1970s were the heyday of banners and signs made by fans. Years later, they would be replaced by ubiquitous corporate signage.

I grew up in the suburbs, and there’s something inefficient about the suburban layout, with a central business district that’s busy from 9 to 5 but empty on evenings and weekends, bedroom communities that empty out during the day, and cars all fighting each other on narrow roads during rush hour. Single-use stadiums fit into this wasteful and expensive pattern. But . . . suburbs are not so simple. Those 1950s and 1960s-era stadiums served multiple teams, the central business district could be busy with nightlife, and bedroom communities are not actually empty during the day—they’re bustling with kids, retired people, stay-at-home mothers, etc., along with local businesses. Guridy’s book, like Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson’s “Retrofitting Suburbia,” is all about multiple uses. Here he is describing Madison Square Garden in the P. T. Barnum era:

Maintaining a permanent structure in one location with access to the same local audience proved to be its own challenging endeavor.

And later:

As beautiful as White’s palace was, it was unable to overcome the same problem as its predecessor: it could not pay for itself. It cost $20,000 a month to operate the complex, and a $2 million mortgage hung over the facility. The horse shows, circus acts, dog races, and bicycle races brought in spectators, but ticket sales could not cover the building’s debts.

Maybe they should’ve thrown in some bullfights?

Here are some stories of how sports have changed. The 1941 Sugar Bowl:

But all the excitement and glory for Boston College would happen without Lou Montgomery, the Eagles’ talented running back. In this period, a “gentleman’s agreement” existed between northern and southern colleges and universities whereby northern schools would adhere to southern racial norms and laws by barring their black players from suiting up for play against white players . . . Looking back at this routine occurrence of racial exclusion, it is astonishing to see how thoroughly the southern Jim Crow machinery erased Montgomery’s presence from the team. Aside from one team photo in the published Sugar Bowl program, in which Montgomery appears unidentified, not one article mentions him or his contributions to the team. Not even the Boston sportswriters covered his exclusion from the game. Bowl organizers, the journalists, and the Boston College team itself all participated in the erasure of Montgomery’s presence on the team.

What’s most amazing to me there is not that a stadium in the deep south discriminated against African-Americans, or even that a northern university acquiesced in this practice—that’s how it went back then, back before the U.S. fought a war against the Nazis. What stuns me is the behavior of the Boston sportswriters. Journalists are always looking for a good story, right? You’d think that this would be a juicy pitch right down the middle for some predecessor to Peter Gammons and Bill Simmons: a rabble-rousing column mocking and stirring up righteous anger about the backward racist southerners. I get it that Boston was a pretty conservative town back then. Still, I didn’t realize its sportswriters wouldn’t even take a swing at that one!

I guess the other factor is that being a sportswriter in 1941 was a pretty comfortable job. Not that they were paid a lot—they were working stiffs—but they weren’t in today’s hypercompetitive news media environment, either. They had a good gig, so why rock the boat? In this case, a criticism of the Sugar Bowl’s policy would also be implicitly a criticism of Boston College, which by itself and with its church affiliations was one of the city’s leading institutions.

Guridy continues:

Maintaining a white supremacist order during the Jim Crow era took work, especially at a stadium, which by definition is an insti- tution that draws people together.

And he shares this interesting story about the Redskins:

Bobby Mitchell was the first African American star on the pro football team that had resisted desegregation the longest, the team owned by staunch segregationist George Preston Marshall. The franchise that had suffered through many losing seasons with an all-white roster now suddenly had a black player who was making exciting plays and leading the team to victories. Mitchell joined the team because Stewart Udall, the US secretary of the interior, stipulated that the Redskins could not play home games in a federally controlled stadium unless Marshall desegregated the roster.

Sexism too:

The words “no women or children” were printed on press credentials and etched into signs outside press boxes and locker rooms in stadiums throughout the country. The men who covered sports prided themselves on their imagined ability to be objective, insisting that they knew the games they covered better than those who played them. “There’s no cheering in the press box” was the mantra of the midcentury sportswriter. Though they often acted as the voice of team management, journalists fashioned themselves a role akin to that of the theater critic.

Here are some more direct examples of stadiums being involved in politics:

On October 30, 2001, in Yankee Stadium, one of the most hallowed stadiums in America, Bush staged a remarkable bit of political theater. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” the Yankees’ legendary public address announcer Bob Sheppard announced during the pregame ceremonies, “please direct your attention to the area in front of the pitcher’s mound for tonight’s ceremonial first pitch.” The sellout crowd of 55,820 roared as the president of the United States emerged from the Yankees dugout wearing a navy-blue FDNY jacket. When he reached the pitcher’s mound, he raised his right arm and gave the crowd a thumbs-up sign. Then he stepped on the pitching rubber and threw a perfect strike to the catcher. The crowd unleashed a thunderous roar before chanting: “USA! USA!” repeatedly.

And then a couple decades later:

In Minneapolis, activists successfully compelled the Minnesota Twins to remove a statue of longtime owner Calvin Griffith that had been erected outside Target Field, the team’s stadium. Griffith had taken over the management of the franchise from Clark Griffith when it was the Washington Senators and moved it to Minnesota in 1961. Years later, he crowed to local fans during a speech at a Lions Club event that he moved the franchise because he was attracted to the “good hard-working white people” of Minnesota as opposed to the predominantly black population of Washington, DC. Griffith’s comments, well-known for decades, suddenly came to the surface during the rapidly changing atmosphere of 2020. Whereas Griffth’s statue was targeted by activists, the statue to beloved Twins legend Kirby Puckett, which also was located outside the stadium, was not, despite his well-documented history as a perpetuator of domestic violence. A national racial awakening did not always translate into a larger recognition of other forms of oppression.

However, a climate of social and political polarization lingers and continues to show up at the stadium and the arena, whether spectators like it or not. The jet flyovers and the jingoistic performances of American patriotism continue at stadiums and arenas across the country, even if they have toned down just a bit. These displays are now part of an institutionalized and formulaic rotation of stadium advertisements where Black Lives Matter and watered-down “End Racism” slogans coexist with celebrations of law enforcement and the military and ads for State Farm Insurance.

Guridy concludes:

The long history of the American stadium suggests that it plays the role of a public institution irrespective of the nature of its ownership. Investing in a stadium is best understood as a commitment to a public good, akin to budgeting for public parks and other public institutions that facilitate community cohesion. These were the arguments that midcentury stadium builders made to taxpayers in the period when facilities were coming under public control. Ultimately, the stadium needs to recognized, and perhaps actively cultivated, as the multifaceted institution that it has always been in American life.

Make of that what you will.