Editor's Note

The Journal of Sport History has occasionally published thematic forums. The idea for this one was straightforward: to ask a small group of diverse scholars with an interest in sport to think about the sporting past and its relationship to storytelling, to narrative. In some ways, language is inadequate to describe and explain what sport is and was. And yet, what else are we going to do? The impossible-to-attribute aphorism “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” comes to mind. As many of us know, writing about sport and sport history is challenging too. So, working with writer and scholar Carlo Rotella of Boston College, the Journal of Sport History initiated this forum. Rotella wrote the following prompt: Sports encourages storytelling but also has a deep resistance to language. That's because the essential thing that makes sports so appealing and meaningful to so many people—bodies moving in space and time—is nonverbal, even anti-verbal. So it can be hard to capture in words what matters most about sports, which is one reason the subject attracts so much jargon and cliché and inspires other sorts of expressive responses that don't require words, like high fives and fist pumps and howling. And yet we keep throwing words at sports in our continuing attempt to describe and analyze them, and we keep fashioning those words into stories, analyses, and other such forms designed to carry meaning. The literature of sports is deep and wide, reaching all the way back from tonight's ritual incantations on SportsCenter (goes yard, flushes it) to the oldest stories we know: there are wrestling matches in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad, for instance, and funeral games in the latter also feature boxing, foot racing, and chariot racing.This is an invitation to think about some aspect of our efforts to impose form and meaning on sports with words—a charge embracing fiction and nonfiction, historical and contemporary topics, whatever you want to make of it. Our objective is to publish a small portfolio of 3,000-word essays in the Journal of Sport History that come from a variety of enlightening angles at the general topic defined by the tension between the way sports inspires the storytelling impulse and the way sports resists language and the larger imposition of form and meaning that language promises to make possible. If you're interested in participating, you can take whatever kind of 3,000-word-sized bite out this general subject that makes sense to you, whether that's a historical case study; a meditation on a particular figure, event, or text; puzzling out a problem; or some other kind of essay.We're taking a “draft the best athlete” approach to this experiment—inviting writers who seem likely to us to have something interesting to say and asking those invitees to pick their own subject matter. Maybe this is an opportunity to grapple with an enigmatic figure or moment that has been bugging you, maybe it's a chance to put your finger on a tendency in the way we (fans, scholars, Americans) understand sports or use sports to understand something else, maybe it's an excuse to unleash a high-quality version of a favorite barroom soliloquy. You tell us. If you're interested in participating, we're eager to hear from you about what you might want to do with this prompt.And then he provided each forum contributor with valuable editorial guidance. This is the result.