Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Sports rivalries are a wonderful thing. They stimulate excellence on the field, the court, the ring, the links, whatever the place of competition. They generate attention from even the most casual observer of the sport and the activities of its players. Who didn't tune in to watch the Soviets play the Americans in hockey during the Olympics; not only was it a great rivalry on the ice it also held enormous geopolitical resonance.
Richard O. Davies's "Rivals!" is an enjoyable recitation of the histories of several rivalries extending across a broad spectrum of sporting activities from the late nineteenth century to the present. These include Yale/Harvard, Bears/Packers, and Michigan/Ohio State in football; Dodgers/Giants and Yankees/Red Sox in baseball; Duke/North Carolina in college basketball; Lakers/Celtics in professional basketball; and the three individual rivalries of Jack Nicklaus/Arnold Palmer in gold, Joe Frazier/Mohammed Ali in boxing, and Chris Evert/Martina Navratilova in tennis.
OK, this is fine as far as it goes. It is obvious that there are many other possibilities, and depending on your perspective it might be more appropriate than the rivalries Davies came up with. How about the Oakland Raiders/Kansas City Chiefs football rivalry? How about the Auburn/Alabama college football rivalry? And then there are the great rivalries of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan in figure skating, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird in basketball, Granbling and Southern in college football, John McEnroe and Björn Borg in tennis, the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers in hockey, and Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt in stock car racing, Connecticut vs. Tennessee in women's basketball, and Army and Navy in college football. Then there are the weird rivalries, such as Kelly Slater and Andy Irons in surfing, Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant in professional wrestling, and Seabiscuit vs. War Admiral in horse racing.
I think Davies did fine choosing his top ten, but I like some of these other ones, and what I most dislike is the assertion in the subtitle that these are "The Ten Greatest American Sports Rivalries of the Twentieth Century." I'm not sure they are the greatest, although I will allow that they are great. It would have been entertaining to have seen an essay on the rivalry between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant or about Seabiscuit and War Admiral.
In the end, the one issues that forces me to give this a four star rather than a five star review is that it spent more time reciting the various histories of the teams discussed rather than their rivalries. What took place between them, were their fights in the stands, did fights break out at bars, did other ugly things take place? Likewise, were they friendly rivalries and how did fans deal with it. In the end this is not just about the teams and the players, but also about cities and regions and their allegiances. I would have liked to know much more about that. Additionally, there was little analysis of what a rivalry in sports means in twentieth century America, something that I would welcome in this study. As it is, the book is enjoyable and useful to a point, but I await others who will really try to analyze this phenomenon.
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