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Representing the sporting past in museums and halls of fame

Sports museums and sports halls of fame have become an ubiquitous part of the heritage landscape. Not only do many teams, leagues, individual sports, famous venues, and champion athletes have dedicated museums, sport has also become part of more generalist museums, sport sites have been increasingly recognized as important locations in sharing and revealing our past, and sport heritage has been recognized as a potent and powerful tourist attraction. Yet, as Murray G. Phillips notes in the introduction to his edited volume, though there are hundreds of dedicated sport museums globally and countless other museum-like sports displays throughout the world, there have been surprisingly few academic explorations into the sports museum phenomenon. Furthermore, those explorations that come from disciplines such as history have tended to dismiss sports museums as having little academic value, a view Phillips suggests overlooks the value these institutions have in disseminating and creating the sporting past. As such, this edited volume is a welcome addition to the limited, but important, academic canon of sport heritage and public sport history. Given that this is an edited text, the contributors to the volume tackle the idea of the sports museum from a variety of different perspectives, offering not only a diversity in terms of geographical locations and types of sport, but also varying approaches to what constitutes a ‘sports museum.’ The chapters in this text are, by and large, interesting and engaging, though a few notable contributions stand out from the rest. Mark O’Neill and Gary Osmond’s chapter about the changing use of Phar Lap, the champion Australian racehorse, seamlessly fuses the work of the historian with that of the heritage manager, understanding that museum artefacts have their own history and are interpreted differently depending on the needs and values of the present in which they exist. Douglas A. Brown’s chapter about the Whyte Museum in Banff, Canada reveals that, though the museum rarely explicitly exhibits sport history, its existence is largely the result of the Canadian Rockies having a sport tourism heritage through mountaineering, skiing, and outdoor recreation. Wray Vamplew’s examination of four London-based sports museums notes the evolution of some sports exhibits to be more diverse and critical in terms of topics, though not all sports museums fully embrace a broader and more challenging interpretation of the sporting past. Finally, both Douglas Booth’s examination of Bondi Park and Australian beach culture, and Jaime Schultz’s discussion of commemoration and memorialization of segregation-era sport and recreation pasts, challenges our understanding of what constitutes a sports museum and sport heritage. Annals of Leisure Research, Vol. 15, No. 3, October 2012, 312 313