LA Sports: Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels

375 Pages·2018·8.359 MB·English

by  Wayne Wilson, David K. Wiggins

LA Sports
Other Titles in This Series
Making March Madness:
The Early Years of the NCAA, NIT,
and College Basketball Championships, 1922–1951
San Francisco Bay Area Sports:
Golden Gate Athletics, Recreation, and Community
Separate Games:
African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation
Baltimore Sports:
Stories from Charm City
Philly Sports: Teams, Games, and Athletes from Rocky’s Town
DC Sports: The Nation’s Capital at Play
Frank Merriwell and the Fiction of All-American Boyhood
Democratic Sports: Men’s and Women’s College Athletics
Sport and the Law: Historical and Cultural Intersections
Beyond C. L. R. James:
Shifting Boundaries of Race and Ethnicity in Sports
A Spectacular Leap:
Black Women Athletes in Twentieth-Century America
Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton
LA Sports
Play, Games,
and Community
in the City of Angels
Edited by
Wayne Wilson and David K. Wiggins
Copyright © 2018 by The University of Arkansas Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-68226-052-4
eISBN: 978-1-61075-629-7
22 21 20 19 18 5 4 3 2 1
Designer: Jamie McKee
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48–1984.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947017
To Jan, a true LA athlete

Contents
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction “I Love LA”:
The Sporting Culture of Los Angeles 3
Mark Dyreson
1. The Life Cycles of Sports Venues in Los Angeles:
Sports and Local Economic Development 19
Greg Andranovich and Matthew J. Burbank
2. On Los Chorizeros, the Classic, and El Tri:
Sports and Community in Mexican Los Angeles 37
Luis Alvarez
3. Pitches Less Than Perfect:
Notes on the Landscape of Soccer in Los Angeles 55
Jennifer Doyle
4. Figure Skating in Southern California:
From Frontier to Epicenter 71
Susan Brownell
5. Sports Car Paradise: Racing in Los Angeles 93
Jeremy R. Kinney
6. Professional Football in the City of Angels:
The Game Moves West 109
Raymond Schmidt
7. The 1932 Olympics:
Spectacle and Growth in Interwar Los Angeles 129
Sean Dinces
8. “Never Go Back”: Pasadena Racial Politics
and the Robinson Brothers 149
Gregory Kaliss
9. Reel Sports: Hollywood Stars at Play in LA 167
Daniel A. Nathan
10. Behind the Curtain: Leadership, Ingenuity,
and Culture in the Making of Earvin “Magic” Johnson,
Showtime, and the Laker Dynasty 183
Scott N. Brooks
11. The Golden Games: The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics 201
Matthew P. Llewellyn, Toby C. Rider, and John Gleaves
12. Shaping the Boom:
Los Angeles Surfing from George Freeth to Gidget 219
Tolga Ozyurtcu
13. The Halcyon Days of Muscle Beach: An Origin Story 239
Jan Todd
14. I Was Standing There All the While:
Jim Murray and the Birth of a Sports Mecca 255
Ted Geltner
15. Vin Scully: The Voice of Los Angeles 275
Elliott J. Gorn and Allison Lauterbach Dale
Notes 291
Contributors 341
Index 347
Series Editor’s Preface
Sport is an extraordinarily important phenomenon that pervades the lives of
many people and has enormous impact on society in an assortment of different
ways. At its most fundamental level, sport has the power to bring people great
joy and satisfy their competitive urges while at once allowing them to form
bonds and a sense of community with others from diverse backgrounds and
interests and various walks of life. Sport also makes clear, especially at the high-
est levels of competition, the lengths that people will go to achieve victory as
well as how closely connected it is to business, education, politics, economics,
religion, law, family, and other societal institutions. Sport is, moreover, partly
about identity development and how individuals and groups, irrespective of
race, gender, ethnicity, or socioeconomic class, have sought to elevate their
status and realize material success and social mobility.
Sport, Culture, and Society seeks to promote a greater understanding of
the aforementioned issues and many others. Recognizing sport’s powerful
influence and ability to change people’s lives in significant and important ways,
the series focuses on topics ranging from urbanization and community develop-
ment to biographies and intercollegiate athletics. It includes both monographs
and anthologies that are characterized by excellent scholarship, accessible to a
wide audience, and interesting and thoughtful in design and interpretations.
Singular features of the series are authors and editors representing a variety
of disciplinary areas and who adopt different methodological approaches.
The series also includes works by individuals at various stages of their careers,
both sport studies scholars of outstanding talent just beginning to make their
mark on the field and more experienced scholars of sport with established
reputations.
LA Sports: Play, Games, and Community in the City of Angels provides import-
ant information and insights into the development of sport in a city known
for its sunshine, beaches, palm trees, crowded freeways, glamorous lifestyles,
and movie stars. Edited by Wayne Wilson and myself, the collection of essays
is written by well-known scholars with long publication lists and expertise on
various aspects of sport in Los Angeles. Although space limitations did not