Fields of Play
Sport, Race, and Memory in the Steel City
Published on 4. August 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
264 pages
978-0-8229-6744-6 (ISBN)
Description
Americans love sports, from neighborhood pickup basketball to the National Football League, and everything in between. While no city better demonstrates the connection between athletic games and community than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the common association of the city's professional sports teams with its blue-collar industrial past illustrates a white nostalgic perspective that excludes the voices of many who labored in the mines and mills and played on local fields. In this original and lyrical history, Robert T. Hayashi addresses this gap by uncovering and sharing overlooked tales of the region's less famous athletes: Chinese baseball players, Black women hunters, Jewish summer campers, and coalminer soccer stars. These athletes created separate spaces of play while demanding equal access to the region's opportunities on and off the field. Weaving together personal narrative with accounts from media, popular culture, legal cases, and archival sources, Fields of Play details how powerful individuals and organizations used recreation to promote their interests and shape public memory. Combining this rigorous archival research with a poet's voice, Hayashi vividly portrays how coal towns, settlement houses, municipal swimming pools, state game lands, stadia, and the city's landmark rivers were all sites of struggle over inclusion and the meaning of play in the Steel City.
Reviews / Votes
A fascinating study of the complex interplay of race, gender, politics and capitalism in our local sporting life. * Pittsburgh Magazine * Hayashi uncovers hidden pasts, half-forgotten histories, and new angles on sporting life. * 90.5 WESA * Part history, part memoir, and infused with the author's feelings of alienation, belonging and nostalgia, "Fields of Play" is informative, blunt and, at times, poignant. * Pittsburgh Post-Gazette * The book's most significant contribution to sport history is perhaps its examination of Asian American sporting experiences outside Hawaii and the West Coast, where the limited scholarship on that topic has been focused. * Journal of American History * Focused on Pittsburgh's vaunted athletic past, Fields of Play revisits the question Fitzgerald posed so well in The Great Gatsby: Who is included and who is excluded from the American Dream? With wry, devastating, and surprisingly tender insight, Robert T. Hayashi simultaneously breaks down the myths of the melting pot and the even playing field. Fields of Play is the perfect cure for our lazy hometown nostalgia. -- Stewart O'Nan, author of Everyday People and Emily, Alone This is an exceedingly bracing sports book. The history of Pittsburgh comes alive through Hayashi's sporting lens, and our sports world is enriched by seeing it through the eyes of Pittsburgh-all of Pittsburgh-itself. It's not just the history and engaging prose. It's the diversity of perspectives and hidden histories that set this book apart. I can only hope that because of Fields of Play, a thousand flowers will bloom, and more writers will aspire-and be inspired-to give the Hayashi treatment to their city as well. -- Dave Zirin, author of The Kaepernick Effect and sports editor, the NationMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Pittsburgh PA
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
14 b&w
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
395 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8229-6744-6 (9780822967446)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Robert T. Hayashi is associate professor of American studies at Amherst College. He was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is the author of Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West.