Sport History Review, 2009, 40, 126-142 2009 Human Kinetics, Inc.

Constructing the Sports Community: Canadian Sports Columnists, Identity, and the Business of Sport in the 1940s
Duncan Koerber
University of Toronto Mississauga In the mid-1940s, Canadian newspapers reported on the business of sport, a common topic of the sports pages then as now. This writing reflected in part the fundamental changes occurring in sports business at the time. The 19th-century ideals of amateurism had declined in popular journalism between the wars as commercialization had taken hold of society in general and sport in particular. Newspaper pages contained breathless reports of player salaries, the revenues of sports teams, and the high cost of tickets. Yet there was a negative attitude in this coverage as sports columnists complained about the problems caused by the excesses of the business. Sports columnists today express a similar attitude, complaining about the ticket prices at arenas or the high salaries paid to players. This paper examines the sports business writing of two columnists in particular, Jim Coleman of the Globe and Mail and Andy Lytle of the Toronto Star, as well as their colleagues, to document this attitude. This paper examines sports columnists specific rhetoric and, more importantly, positions this rhetoric as part of a greater process of community formation and protection. I argue that the coverage of the business of sport should not be seen simply as a reflection of changes in the business of sport; the coverage of the business of sport should be examined discursively, as a site where sports columnists constructed their own journalistic identities as they policed the mediated sports world on behalf of fans. Many studies of 19th- and early 20th-century sport in Canada use newspapers as a source for explicit arguments, but rarely is the content seen as structuring the meanings of sport. But authors in any medium use language to encode ways of seeing the world, setting up relations between participants, and these constructions are successful when people accept them.1 Some recent studies of Canadian sports journalism in history have positioned content in this way. For instance, Stacy Lorenz has looked at the symbols and meanings that made up the mediated sports communities so many people joined.2 Newspaper reports served as a site of contestation of meanings surrounding hockey and masculinity in a study by Lorenz and Geraint Osborne, who examined sports narratives.3 Similarly, Daniel Mason and Gregory

The author is with the Professional Writing and Communication Program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

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Duquette examined the differing coverage of hockey violence in newspapers to understand the ideologies behind these varying constructions circulated by sports journalists.4 In these ways, studies of journalism content take into account discourse, narrative, and ideology as a foundation of meaning, rather than simply using that content as a factual source of past events. Despite the growing popularity of this approach, Canadian sports business writing has never been examined in this way. This study analyzes all articles about sports business published in 1944 and 1945 in the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star, two of the largest circulation newspapers of the time. These articles are deconstructed into categories suggested by discourse theorist Norman Fairclough:5 sports business coverage 1) represented the sports world in a certain way, 2) assigned identities to the people involved in the event or issue, and 3) created a relationship between the journalist and the reader. Sports columnists unconsciously constructed a sense of the sports world that they monitored and regulated, replete with characters such as greedy owners, money-hungry athletes, innocent fans, and watchdog sports writers. The columnists in these two newspapers had a large and wide readership in Canada, giving them notoriety and, in some cases, fame. These two years also represent a large body of writing in an important period that saw the culmination of both the Second World War and the initial stage of sports commercialization, a crisis moment when the value of sport was tested by the seriousness of war. I present this account as a preliminary study and a model for other researchers looking at journalistic content, particularly the business coverage of sport, as an expression of culture.

Jim Coleman and Andy Lytle

This paper examines all the writing on the business of sport in these two newspapers, but the work of two leading columnists, Coleman and Lytle, is considered in particular depth here because it appeared regularly, a cause and reflection of their notoriety in Canadian sports journalism in the 20th century. Before he arrived at the Globe and Mail in 1941, Coleman (1911-2001) worked at the Vancouver Province, the Edmonton Journal, and the Winnipeg Tribune, eventually receiving an appointment to the Order of Canada in 1974 as well as a number of sports and media halls of fame. He took a particular interest in horseracing from an early age, eventually publishing a memoir, A Hoofprint on My Heart, about his association with the sport. He also served as publicity director of the Ontario Jockey Club. The racetrack was his spiritual home, as he said he felt happier on the racetrack than I could have been in any other environment.6 Toronto Sun columnist Jim Hunt called Coleman the most amusing sports columnist that this country has ever had absolutely brilliant.7 Despite a similar productivity, Andy Lytles biography is limited. Lytle (1884-1959) began in the newspaper business with the British Columbian in Coquitlam, B.C., where he worked as correspondent and copy reader. Later, he worked at the Vancouver Province and Vancouver Sun before joining the Toronto Star in 1934, where he stayed until 1949.8 Upon Lytles debut at the Star, the respected sports editor Lou Marsh told readers Lytle would get in their hair like cockle burrs to a woolen sock.9 Lytle is best known in the sports history literature for his columns that criticized female athletes.10

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The Professional Sports Owner

In the discourse of the business of sport, one key identity columnists constructed was that of the professional sports owner. Lytle, Coleman, and their colleagues constructed an image of the professional sports owner as interested solely in money and not in satisfying the fan. The professional sports owner was deemed to be passing off lesser quality sport as professional sport. During the Second World War, professional sports leagues still operated. But with some of the better talent off to war, owners brought in lesser talented players to fill rosters. Despite the economic challenges of wartime, people still paid for tickets and attended matches in great numbers. In early 1944, Lytle contended that the quality of the wartime game was so bad because the Maple Leafs dressed kitchen help and grocery clerks instead of quality players.11 The discourse of professionalism was so thoroughly entrenched by this time that these players could not suffice as acceptable product, he said; indeed, this attitude reflected the fact that professional sport itself depended on skill to have any market value at all.12 Lytle argued that the National Hockey League (NHL) generally was less interested in compiling human than metallic statistics.13 He wrote sarcastically about this situation at length: As it is the chief trinket in the leagues possession, I would award the Stanley cup to the city which most richly rewarded the directorate at the gates. The Hart trophy I would award to Boston because it produced Citizen Ross, the man who invented the centre ice red line which completely disrupted the game of hockey by making it impossible for an observer to distinguish between a champion player and a boy off the minor or the juvenile streets.14 Later that year, Coleman also derided the quality of Maple Leafs hockey, saying that fans who paid for a match were cheated terribly by the teams performance.15 Coleman wondered how hockey survived in light of the fact that owners seemed more interested in making profits than putting quality on the ice: Hockey must be a great gameit is a great game simply because it continues to flourish16 despite the work of some of its moguls [who] persist in running this $2,000,000 business like a 10-cent carnival.17 Lytle did not hide team officials reaction to his complaints; he publicly reported, and then denounced, a conversation with them in which they said it was more than a coincidence that Torontos gate receipts were down though they are up in the other five cities of the league. Specifically, according to Lytle, one team official said, We want you to boost hockey not knock it as you have been doing.18 Coleman also told his readers that he had heard that NHL officials placed the blame for this defection of fans on the Globe and Mails negative coverage.19 Despite the criticism, the columnists approach did not waver. In response, they took moral positions on the business of sport that resembled the work of moral crusaders in political journalism. Lytle investigated and published details of the Maple Leafs business to counter the notion that his negativity affected attendance at all. After one game he said it would have warmed the cold (they said) cockles of those golden hearts of the NHL who have been moaning about falling off in receipts at Maple Leaf Gardens . . . 11,538 customers was the official poll, and that is as good as the

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Hawks have ever done in this city since Major McLaughlin turned from coffee pursuits to the collection of human ivory.20 On Saturday, February 5, 1944, after the Maple Leafs grossed approximately $20,000 in revenue from a single game according to his report, Lytle took another shot at his critics: I hope the gentlemen who recently lectured me on the wily presumption that I was a figure menacing hockeys profits are given these figures and that it will wipe away all tears from their eyes for the management they said I was steering toward ruin.21 This approach was not unusual for Lytle. Lytle defended his role as journalist even as he implied fans should not accept substandard quality. He employed the raw numbers of the hockey business to prove his point, evidencing a good understanding of sports financial foundation. He wrote, Since Oct. 30 last, the team played to 279,261 cash customers. Add to that total over 27,000 that saw em lose two gravy-train voyages to Canadiens and the figure is 306,261. . . In short, Leafs played 27 games at home [and] our boys grossed a sum of $540,000 for the directorate.22 Note the sarcasm of the phrases gravy-train voyages and our boys these were not simple business facts, but facts intended to prove his opinion and defend his place as a journalist. Another time, Lytle reported that a win in the playoffs had added $100,000 to the Maple Leafs ledgers.23 The headline on his article about the Leafs 1945 Stanley Cup win blared sarcastically Stanley Cup Series Better Than GoldMine24 as he explained the monetary value of the championship to the Leafs. All of these articles were written in a witty style that foregrounded the way the Maple Leafs made money off fans. All of these reports expressed his belief that, Possibly the steadiest revenue producer in the league is the carefully directed job at the corner of Carlton and Church, a fact that remains true to this day.25 Similar criticism extended to other sports as well. Lytles colleague David J. Walsh took baseball owners to task for running what he thought were substandard quality games, wondering if a reduced quality of play shouldnt perforce bring about a corresponding reduction in admission prices from owners.26 Walsh also had sarcastically complained about how much owner Bill Cox of the Philadelphia Phillies had made on the sale of the team in those trying times.27 These columnists approaches to the owner understood the game was a business, and that businesses should be run well like a grocery store or a clothing business but the excesses of management gave writers a cause. This value-for-money rhetoric and the denigration of the owner was not inevitable; sports columnists could have simply reported on the action at the arena and park and avoided controversy to give readers an escape from war news. These columnists were immersed in the details of the business of sport and could use them in their own defense, but ultimately that defense was made on behalf of the fan, they implied. Sports columnists complaints also resembled greater concerns of the general public in wartime. Jeff Keshen has shown how people thought fellow citizens used the wars economic situation to make high profits outside of price controls. People also worried about the moral effects of war on society and wished for stability in their lives. People turned to newspapers in great numbers for news about the war, and they would have found that media

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generally supported moral reform and, in particular, the implementation of price controls on producers of goods.28 While the attitude towards owners likely mimicked greater concerns during wartime, it also resembled the approach taken by other journalists towards powerful people and institutions. As Michael Schudson has noted, the 20th century saw reporters develop a political consciousness and even take on political roles.29 Journalism generally constructs a world in which the political realm is preeminent.30 Like the political columnist monitoring and regulating the political domain, the sports columnist monitored and regulated the sports domain, which by the 1940s had developed into a symbiotic system of pro sport and media now called mediasport or the sports-media complex.31 This relationship between media and sport had grown out of the very broad changes occurring in society during the late-1800s, those of industrialization and urbanization. Sporting entrepreneurs of the late-1800s held contests for money, attracting amateur athletes to professionalism. With new technology like the railway, teams could travel and play teams from other cities. The 1890s saw the introduction of many new non-political peoples journals, such as the Toronto Star, that attracted a broad and large audience, and the content of peoples journals was broader than previous newspaper types, including sports.32 Advertising had helped drive the development of mass newspapers around the turn of the 20th century, as newspapers editors knew they required large audiences to get advertisers.33 Newspaper editors recognized the value of sports readership and sports advertising to bottom lines, while sports entrepreneurs realized the value of newspaper publicity to increasing sales of tickets. Advertising brought the realms of the newspaper and organized sport together. As media communication became more pervasive and the speed of information transmission increased, interest in sport increased even more.34 This growing professionalized media business enabled columnists to enjoy a platform for the expression of views on the business of sport. The new popular dailies around the turn of the century saw their own roles as watchdogs for the public, particularly promoting reform causes for working people, an approach that clearly still resonated in the 1940s.35

The Problem of the Paid Player

Another construction in the discourse of the business of sport was the money-hungry paid player. The money-hungry paid player was the opposite of the amateur, which as Alan Metcalfe has noted, rose to prominence in the late-1800s and became an important cultural ideal lasting well into the beginning decades of the 20th century. With class divisions growing, and workers starting to play for pay, and thus competing against amateurs of other classes, dominant groups looked for ways to prevent the intermingling of amateurs and professionals in sport. In 1881, the Amateur Athletic Association of England codified club eligibility rules based on money getting paid for play was against the rules.36 Canadian amateur associations enacted similar rules around the same time. A dislike of the money-hungry paid player was not new. In the amateur age, sports writers had targeted the professional athlete as an outsider and the bane of sport. But by the 1940s, this was an untenable position since professional sport was ascendant; criticizing the professional for taking money would have made no sense, and obsessing over the cause of the

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amateur likely seemed pass. But this did not mean sports writers had to ignore the professional athlete. Lytle questioned professional athletes competitive desire. He wondered if money made them lazy: It is a fair estimate, he wrote, that professional hockey players are employed at hockey tasks one hour per day, six days a week and occasionally seven. The rest of the time they do sweet-fanny-all.37 Part of this complaint likely sprung from the fact that wartime games used lesser talented players, as discussed earlier. However, the complaint remains common in sports discourse today, suggesting it is rooted in greater concerns about capitalism, the value of labour, and perhaps even the morality of youth. Lytle warned of money adversely influencing the motives of young, up-and-coming athletes. In one case, he sat in an arena watching the Ottawa and Oshawa juniors when a young player, just acquired by Oshawa from the St. Mikes Majors, slipped into a seat beside an NHL coach. To Lytles surprise, the boy asked the man What should I charge them for my services?38 Clearly even athletes were beginning to see sport as a marketplace where they offered services rather than simply playing games. This desire to play for money rather than play for the love of the game threatened sport, Lytle argued. In an unusual, metaphoric style, he said, When you dangle five and six hundred buck bouquets of lovely frogskins before the eyes of players who in the past may have gingerly fished the odd five spot out of the toe of a cleated boot for a seasons play, it is no exaggeration to say they become staggery if not actually dazzled, or grab-happy.39 Columnists printed the salaries of players, not just as fact about the business of sport but to defend the argument about the excesses of the sports business. Some players salaries reported in the press caused the public to judge a player by his pay cheque. Babe Pratt of the Maple Leafs was the teams highest paid player during the 1944-45 season and his unsatisfactory play made him the publics favourite whipping boy, according to one report.40 The emphasis on money, salaries, gates and receipts became tiresome for some. Star columnist Annis Stukus felt frustrated with hearing about gates, splits and whats in it for me all the time.41 With all the money going around, players made more than the average fan. When a player actually did not take the money, it was a surprise. Edgar Laprade apparently refused the Montreal Canadiens offer of $12,000 for a two-year contract. If that is true, the Star wrote, they should put a stuffed model of Laprade in the hockey hall of fame as a specimen of that extinct character an amateur.42 In this period, columnists set up both the owner and player as targets.

The Fan as Customer

A third identity found in the coverage of the business of sport, but with a more positive connotation, was a faceless, nameless individual: the sports fan. Any media text suggests identities for readers such as the identities of citizen, taxpayer, or sports fan.43 Spectators themselves were nothing new by the 1940s, but as Alan Guttmann argues, the press helped form a culture of spectatorship.44 Within that culture, fans were portrayed in a certain light, imbued with a certain meaning. As they were hailed by texts,45 fans were shown as excited, interested, unselfish, and pure. They were interested in the love of the game and nothing else. As practitioners, sports columnists and others encouraged fan affiliation even among

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people who would never set foot in an arena or stadium. Discursively, however, fans were constructed as customers.46 The use of the customer to identify fans foregrounded the changing relationship between people and sport, as they bought tickets and the game became regarded as a product. The word suggested the marketplace, an idea that fit well with both the business world and the sports world. Paul Rutherford has argued that the mass press itself manufactured a new type the fan of money-making and sports.47 Practically speaking, the Globe and Mail of the 1940s was specifically targeted to people interested in sports and people interested in the stock market.48 It is not surprising then that business discourses would influence the sports pages. In the amateur age around the turn of the 20th century, sports writers in the Globe and Star did not call fans customers. There was no reason; sports had yet to become so pervasively commercialized. Instead, sports writers predominantly called viewers of sports then spectators and crowds.49 In addition, viewers of sports were called baseball lovers, supporters, the bicycling public, the hockey loving public, lovers of pure amateurism, and more plainly, visitors, persons, and people.50 These identities did not evoke connotations of the marketplace; they suggested pure participants in the community of sport untouched by the corrupting influence of money. On the other hand, to see fans as customers emphasized the fans role as consumers of professional sport. Maple Leaf fans bought tickets in the 1940s like they would buy a hat. An obligation existed that, as with the purchase of a hat, the ticket bought a product with a high quality, although that quality could only be determined after setting foot inside the playing area. Upon constructing this social type, the fan-as-customer, sports columnists monitored whether the sports product met a certain standard of quality and whether customers felt satisfied. Whether the fans were satisfied or not is unclear, but the discourse was unambiguous. This shift in the way the spectator was constructed resembled a shift in the way newspapers viewed readers more broadly. In the second half of the 1800s, industrialization and urbanization refashioned the way people related to each other and the way they worked. Factories drew workers from the countryside to the city, developing new urban communities. The market increasingly dictated social relations, leaving less agency for people in their lives. But with the advent of the workday came leisure time that capitalist entrepreneurs filled with sporting diversions at a price.51 In the early to mid-1800s, partisan newspapers had constructed readers as citizens. But later, a new commercial, non-partisan press addressed readers not as citizens but as consumers. The use of customer to define fans reflected the culmination of this change in the constructed subjectivity of the reader. Associated with this construction of the fan-as-customer was another discursive move: the aggregation of these individual customers into crowds and audiences through attendance reports. Attendance had always been a key part of sports reports in the Globe and Star52 and even finds a place in the simplest of game reports today. Articles in the sports pages of 1919 and 1920, for example, blared phrases like Biggest Crowd of the Season, Enormous Crowd at Windsor Meet, and Biggest Crowd at Thorncliffe.53 In 1944 and 1945, attendance was important; it was reported even though it served no obvious purpose to the reports of the action on the field or ice. A summary of a weeks NHL games in February, 1944, noted simply that 70,000 customers paid to see five NHL games over the week-end.54

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The Chicago Blackhawks average attendance was reported at 13,847, a great windfall for the team, a writer said.55 Lytle reported straight from the mouth of the Leafs Frank Selke, without judgement, that the mail order demand for tickets for Saturday nights game here between Toronto Leafs and Canadiens is the heaviest that he can recall.56 Attendance reports presented a problem, however, for the journalist arguing that quality was low: high attendance continued despite press criticism. Lytle lamented that Torontonians would support hockey no matter how badly the team performed. He wrote, people have been saying for years and years around this burg: Toronto is a great sports centre but it wont go for anything but a winner. Thats hooey and the Leafs management can prove it at the box office.57 That same year, a bemused Coleman could hardly believe that nearly 13,000 customers came out to see what he called a badly played Leafs game.58 Coleman previously wrote that fans were capable of thinking for themselves, and Lytle had once suggested fans were hockey wise, but their attitude at times suggested otherwise.59 Lytle wrote once that the public doesnt know what it wants so the NHL creates it for them and tells them its the real McCoy no matter what it is in essence or distillation.60 Coleman and Lytle were expressing elitism, a sense that fans bought tickets blindly and needed to be informed, by them of course, about the problems of ownership control and paid players. The notion of the fan-as-customer as they conceived of it, as in need of protection, was less a reflection of reality than a sort of strawman columnists could defend. In response to the hockey officials criticism of his writing, Coleman reminded them of the customers [at one Leaf game who] clapped their mittens rhythmically, demanding action. There are about 20 sports writers in town, and they couldnt have made THAT MUCH noise.61 Again, he took the position in defense of the fan. It was the fans that wanted change, he said, deflecting any criticism that he was on a one-man crusade. But the fans purchasing of tickets and attending of matches was far more meaningful than simply a report of a business transaction or money in the pockets of greedy owners. Before games, sports writers encouraged fans to attend, and afterwards, they reported the numbers, foregrounding a large crowd as a spectacle or a small crowd as a disappointment. Since the audience for sports coverage was not simply the people who attended the matches, it also suggested to people who did not attend that the articles they read were important, not only to the journalist but also to many readers. Regardless of public participation in sport, the perception of a sports popularity as a whole hinged on how many spectators attended. Columnists had to find that fine line between criticizing on the grounds of quality and ensuring they did not encourage the breakdown of the sports business by suggesting people should not buy tickets. Attendance reports first and foremost signified the success of the community,62 a community very much constituted in that journalism; attendance reports connected the business of sport, the sports community, and journalism. The relationship between the physical community and the mediated community of newspapers has always been seen as a mutual dependency; Minko Sotiron has shown how closely connected newspapers were to a town, bringing up its morale.63 In a study of early sports media and community in Canada, Stacy Lorenz has noted:

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In conjunction with the telegraph and wire services, daily newspapers and radio constructed a community of interest around sport in Canada and the United States. This community of interest consisted of people who discussed, cared about, and paid attention to the same players, teams, leagues, and events, no matter where they lived.64 Lorenz has argued that the focus on fan support and attendance presented interest as a sign of civic spirit: Because both daily newspapers and sports teams were tied so closely to a citys sense of collective identity, it is not surprising that media coverage of sport embodied aspects of boosterism and community pride.65 Attendance reports worked as boosterism, and a high number evoked pride. More broadly, these sports communities helped people identify with teams; teams came to represent cities and towns, and fans gave their support to the city team against other cities.

Protecting the Play Community

Given the importance of the mediasport domain to columnists livelihoods and communities, it is not surprising that sports columnists projected a negative attitude towards the owner and player while looking over the interests of the fan/ customer. A close connection had formed between peoples identities, their communities, sports and the media.66 The obsession over businesss deleterious effect on sport, whether in the amateur or professional age, reflected greater concerns about threats to these communities generally and perhaps during wartime. James Barbour and William Dowling show that criticism of the infiltration of money into sport, results in the narrative of the death of the game.67 But by the 1940s, the figurative playing field of sport was founded on money; to criticize business interests in principle would have been to strike at its whole foundation. To avoid this dilemma, the sports columnists considered here accepted the infiltration of business into sport but with limits. The narrative of the death of the game and the archetypal characters in it, such as the greedy owner, money-hungry player, and innocent fan, remind us of the importance of the journalist as storyteller and the importance of myths to mediated communities of all kinds. In news, the characters of events in the real world are placed within narratives and given identities (trickster, hero, fool) that make sense to readers and make the job of journalism easier. The mediated sports community is a perfect world for myth because it too seems unreal and its meanings are malleable. News as myth reminds us of what James Carey called the ritual character of news.68 Applied to sports journalism, the ritual model of news suggests that fans read about sports not just for the results or statistics but for the engagement with greater meanings found in rituals of community. Sportswriters drew upon myths of purity and redemption that readers would naturally understand in an attempt to make an argument about the threat of money to the sports community. In their writing, Coleman, Lytle and others expressed both a recognition that sport was a business as well as a concern that the business was beginning to trump the purity of the game, a perspective hinged on their understanding of the nature of sport.

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Sport as Entertainment
When they harangued ownership, questioned the motives of players, and defended customers, Coleman and Lytle agreed that business could hurt sports. But each writers criticism reflected different theoretical positions on the nature of sport in society. Lytle, clearly from an older generation that was still mindful of the amateur battles of the past, depicted sport in his writing as mythical and vital, even if it had been colonized by commercialism. His approach to the business of sport resembled the ideals of the moral reformers of the past, a criticism that reflected an element of the discourse of amateurism that was almost dead.69 Calling fans customers seemed like sarcasm on Lytles part, an implication that these poor fans were not just buyers of product but of substandard product. On the other hand, Coleman, whose youth coincided with the rise of pro leagues, saw professional sport as entertainment that deserved somewhat less reverence. Colemans early years coincided with the rise of consumer culture in the 1920s, and in that era newspapers willingly fed off sport as they offered it up for consumption.70 His criticism of the business of sport reflected the position of a consumer who buys for gratification and little more. As Colin Howell argues, sport in the postwar era was no longer understood to be a social technology that would help create progressive communities; rather, it was considered a form of entertainment that contributed to individual self-fulfillment and happiness and allowed escape from the drudgeries of life.71 Fans as customers had become the norm in a reimagining of sport as an entertainment device.72 Lytles writing suggested a longing for the amateur age, while Colemans writing suggested the professional, commercial sporting age was a foregone conclusion. Lytle faced this rising discourse of sport-as-entertainment when NHL officials complained to him about his coverage of the business of their sport. He reported that NHL officials told him to view NHL hockey in the light of public entertainment . . . viewing the current hockey scene as I would if assigned to cover a performance at a movie house or at the Royal Alex.73 Lytle told the officials, sarcastically, that this concept of sport-as-entertainment reminded me of wrestling, so I brought that form of sporting enterprise up I was promptly accused of being flippant.74 Wrestling clearly did not have the respectability of hockey. Another time, Lytle brought up the comments of Jack Adams, player, coach and general manager, who had said that hockey customers attended for entertainment only. Lytle lamented that sport-as-entertainment was what Lester Patrick decided hockey must become some time ago.75 Lytles language resisted this approach to understanding sport and its operations. On the contrary, Coleman accepted sport-as-entertainment. He criticized American sports author John R. Tunis for publicly deploring the commercialization of sports. Coleman said that while professional sport had its weaknesses, we would point out that no person is under any compulsion to attend a spectator sportIf he wants to pay a scalper $10 for a seat to a playoff hockey game, thats his own business. Futhermore, Coleman agreed with the NHL officials who accosted Lytle, and he wrote that Spectator sports, should be judged only as entertainment. These should be considered in the same class as moving pictures and the theatre generally. 76 Coleman implied that the desire of owners to make money was acceptable. Lytles breathless talk of the revenue that Maple Leaf Gardens produced probably would have been perfectly acceptable to Coleman,

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as long as it did not represent criticism of capitalism itself. But Colemans position allowed him to reserve the right to criticize teams operations, saying sports are open to justifiable criticism. Colemans idea of justifiable criticism revolved around the quality of play, the way a movie critic would assess the artistic merits of a film, he said.77 And Coleman was not averse to thinking about sport in Lytles way. Colemans love of horseracing prompted his own version of the theme of pure sport. He wrote that Men who spend their lives around horses are unique. They have no taste for the world of commerce. . . . They are tribal in that they protect one another against the encroachments of the outside world.78 Horseracing in a city was not run by a single owner, and it did not engage with the same notions of quality as professional sports did, but money could damage horseracing too, Coleman said. He railed against the parasite bookmaker, who siphons off racings lifeblood the money without making any significant contribution to the sport.79 Customers were hungry for entertainment and Coleman told them which forms of entertainment were worthy of their hard-earned money.80 For example, Coleman described one upcoming junior/NHL double-header where tickets were hot commodities. Rather than praising the NHL part of the double bill, he said the first game, the junior hockey match, would be full of wide-open, fast-skating hockey that Maple Leafs games lacked.81 The extent to which this discourse of sport-as-entertainment had become popular among the public is revealed in a letter to Lytle in the Star. One Maple Leaf fan criticized Lytle for being nave and said, He knows by now the Maple Leafs club, as part of Maple Leaf Gardens, is run on a purely business basis, profit-bearing basis producing dividends for shareholders. When it ceases to do that it will eventually go out of business just the same as the corner grocery would in the same circumstances All that the paying public asks is a dollars worth of hockey for the dollar it pays.82 Despite their approach to protecting the fan, this fans comment shows that people understood sport as entertainment, and they were indeed buying a product, a product that they would buy regardless of what a columnist might say on their own terms.

Sports Writers Identities

While these sports columnists constructed the identities of the key participants as documented here, informed by the greater discourses of journalism and society, they created a fourth: their own. These accounts reveal not just reports of shifts in the business of professional sports, much in the way an objective reporter might cover a plane crash or fire. In addition, these accounts served a purpose for journalistic identity. Schudson has argued that in creating a meaningful world for readers, journalists created a career for themselves.83 But this was more than just a career; sports writers were central figures in these discursive sports communities. Jim Hunt noted that Coleman became such a popular journalist among the people that when you walked down the street with him, he knew everybody.84 However, inside newspaper offices, among their colleagues, sports writers found themselves in a strange position. In his autobiography, Coleman noted that

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Among regular news reporters, the sports department was regarded as the half-world of the newspaper business. There was a bit of intellectual snobbery and a certain amount of good-natured contempt for sports reporters who spent their time writing about grown men who were playing childrens games.85 Similarly, American broadcaster Howard Cosell once called the sports section the toy department.86 Scholars have studied this feeling of ambiguity that Coleman describes as an important characteristic of journalistic identity and an inspiration for or limitation on, as the case may be, tougher sports journalism.87 Unlike other journalists, sports writers have unique pressures on their professional identity they find themselves defending charges of being cheerleaders while also trying to be objective professionals.88 Certainly Coleman was careful not to suggest he was ever not objective or was paid by professional sports owners.89 Rumours of the Maple Leafs paying off journalists to promote the team in their articles had circulated.90 Suggesting the importance of independence to sports writers, Globe and Mail columnist J.V. McAree described Lytle as unafraid and unpurchasable.91 Another long-time writer of the period, Trent Frayne, noted that journalistic custom implied there was to be no cheering in the press boxes. He considered it strange to be both a fan and a journalist, so emotionally wrapped up in these sporting communities while knowing he had to be detached. He wrote in his autobiography, I can recall hearing myself cheer only twice and both times I was surprised to recognize my own voice.92 The identity of the sports writer was complicated by the pressures coming from inside and outside journalism, and the business of sport was a site where that conflict played out. Lytle, Coleman, and others likely had to deal with the question of whether they were covering simply fun and games, or something more important. Reporting on the business of sport gave them something important to cover, a topic of focus that connected them with fans and suggested their work was like that of their colleagues in the news or business departments. Sportswriters themselves were increasingly professionalized and part of a large business; the crusading professional journalist was a model they likely would have known well.

Conclusion
The protective attitude on behalf of the fan reflected a defense of a certain kind of society during a time of great and often unsettling changes of industrialization, urbanization, commercialization, and war. As David Rowe argues, sports commentaries suggesting a problem of disorder in the game are often not simply about disorder in sport but disorder in life more generally.93 Sports columnists in 1944 and 1945 in these two newspapers monitored and protected this sports world by reporting threats, such as the influence of money and power. Sports writers became, in a sense, consumer advocates while defending the sporting public interest during wartime. In these ways, sports journalists justified their own positions as real journalists and not just members of the toy department of the commercial newspaper. This one account of a small period of specific conflict between sports columnists, owners, and players provides a partial look at how sports journalists constructed and defended the sporting community that was vital to their existence. As sports writers in the amateur age had done before them, these writers invoked

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the myth of purity a sport free of the excesses of business while at the same time presenting the fan as a customer. They did not report dispassionately on the facts and figures of sports business in Canada. Instead, their moralizing coverage reflected a culture of sport imbued with their own notions of professional journalism and attitudes of the time. This study makes a preliminary attempt to understand the coverage of the business of sport in a new way. Further studies using a wider corpus of business writing to understand differences of place and newspaper size, as well as other discourses, may confirm or extend this argument. Ultimately, we can see in this study that sports business content did not simply mirror the changes in the way sport was organized, funded, and operated; it also reflected great cultural meanings as sports writers tried to protect the sports community and give meaning to the social identities of the fan, athlete, owner, and journalist.

Notes
1. Norman Fairclough, Language and Power (London and New York: Longman, 1989), 112; Norman Fairclough Media Discourse (London and New York: E. Arnold, 1995), 179. 2. Stacy L. Lorenz, In the Field of Sport at Home and Abroad: Sports Coverage in Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1850-1914, Sport History Review 34 no. 2 (2003): 133. 3. Stacy L. Lorenz and Geraint B. Osborne, Talk About Strenuous Hockey: Violence, Manhood, and the 1907 Ottawa Silver Seven-Montreal Wanderer Rivalry, Journal of Canadian Studies 40, no. 1 (2006): 125-156. 4. Daniel S. Mason and Gregory H. Duquette, Newspaper Coverage of Early Professional Ice Hockey: the Discourses of Class and Control, Media History 10, no. 3 (2004): 157. 5. Fairclough, Media Discourse, 5. 6. Jim Coleman, A Hoofprint on My Heart (Toronto, Montreal: McLelland and Stewart, 1971), 210. 7. Larry Millson, Coleman made a mark in a job he loved, Globe and Mail, January 15, 2001, S6. 8. 9. Red Burnett, Andy Lytle Was Fearless Writer, Toronto Daily Star, June 13, 1959, 33. Lou Marsh, Lou Marsh Introduces Andy Lytle, Toronto Daily Star, February 2, 1934, 11.

10. Bruce Kidd, The Struggle for Canadian Sport (University of Toronto Press, 1996), 139; Margaret Ann Hall, The Girl and the Game (Broadview Press, 2002), 88. 11. Andy Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, April 1, 1944, 12. 12. Colin D. Howell, Blood, Sweat and Cheers: Sport and the Making of Modern Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 54. 13. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, February 18, 1944, 12. 14. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, February 7, 1944, 10. 15. Jim Coleman, Globe and Mail, November 20, 1944, 14. 16. Coleman, Globe and Mail, December 31, 1945, 12. 17. Coleman, Globe and Mail, January 3, 1945, 14. 18. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, January 26, 1944, 10. 19. Coleman, Unexpected Complaint Department, Globe and Mail, January 22, 1944, 14. 20. Lytle, Leafs and Wings drubbed by rejuvenated Hawklets, Toronto Daily Star, January 31, 1944, 8.

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21. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, February 7, 1944, 10. 22. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, April 1, 1944, 12. 23. Lytle, Morrs goal breaks jinx and old champions heart, Toronto Daily Star, April 2, 1945, 12. 24. Lytle, Stanley Cup Series Better Than GoldMineNo Hydraulic Needed! Toronto Daily Star, April 23, 1945, 10. 25. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, October 31, 1944, 12; Maple Leafs most valuable NHL team, Forbes.com, October 29, 2008, http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/10/29/ ap5623049.html. 26. David J. Walsh, Baseballs spot in war set forth by Reynolds, Toronto Daily Star, February 7, 1944, 10. 27. Walsh, Cox reveals he didnt get fat on Philly sale, Toronto Daily Star, January 13, 1944, 12. 28. Jeff Keshen, Saints, Sinners, and Soldiers: Canadas Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 5-14, 73. 29. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 65. 30. Ibid., 66. 31. For a discussion of the relationship between media and sport more broadly see Lawrence A. Wenner, Mediasport (London: Routledge, 1998); Sut Jhally, Cultural Studies and the SportsMedia Complex, in Media, Sports, and Society, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (Newbury Park, Calif: Sage Publications, 1989), 70-93; Robert McChesney, Media made sport: A history of sports coverage in the United States, in Media, Sports, and Society, ed. Lawrence A. Wenner (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989), 49-69. 32. Paul F. W. Rutherford, The Peoples Press: The Emergence of the New Journalism in Canada, 1869-99, Canadian Historical Review 56, no. 2 (June 1975): 177. 33. Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: the Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890-1920 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 157; Lorenz, In the Field of Sport at Home and Abroad, 142. 34. Frank Cosentino, A History of the Concept of Professionalism in Canadian Sport (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Alberta, 1973), 131. 35. Mary Vipond, The Mass Media in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2000), 15. 36. Alan Metcalfe, The Growth of Organized Sport and the Development of Amateurism in Canada, 1807-1914, in Not Just a Game: Essays in Canadian Sport Sociology, ed. Jean Harvey and Hart Cantelon (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1988), 34. 37. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, March 3, 1944, 14. 38. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, April 1, 1944, 12. 39. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, July 14, 1945, 8. 40. Lytle, Nobody cared to give up $3,000 for Bill Thoms? Toronto Daily Star, January 13, 1945, 12. 41. Annis Stukus, When they hold out hand its shake, not shakedown, Toronto Daily Star, December 4, 1945, 12. 42. Sargent Pins Bouquet On Edgar!, Toronto Daily Star, March 6, 1944, 12. 43. Fairclough, Media Discourse, 17; see, for example, Kathryn Woodward, Identity and Difference (London: Sage, 1997); Debra Grodin and Thomas R. Lindlof, eds., Constructing the Self

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in a Mediated World (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); David Gauntlett, Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2008); Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996). 44. Allen Guttmann, Sports Spectators (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 85-86. 45. John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1990), 175. 46. Lytle, Leafs and Wings drubbed by rejuvenated Hawklets; Walsh, Product Inferior but Price Level Maintained, Toronto Daily Star, February 11, 1944, 13; Coleman, Globe and Mail, November 20, 1944, 14; Coleman, Globe and Mail, January 3, 1945, 14; Red Burnett, Allancupping remnants will do best they can, Toronto Daily Star, March 11, 1944, 13; Leafs hold Wings, move slightly away from Hawks, Toronto Daily Star, February 7, 1944, 10. 47. Paul Rutherford, The Making of the Canadian Media (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1978), 61. 48. Jim Coleman, Long Ride on a Hobby-Horse: Memoirs of a Sporting Life (Key Porter Books, 1990), 93. 49. The Shamrocks at Brampton, Globe, September 11, 1894, 8; Sports of all sorts, Globe, April 22, 1895, 6; Ottawa Loses at Montreal, Globe, January 14, 1895, 6; Varsity surprised. Defeated by Osgoode at Victoria Rink Last Night, Toronto Evening Star, February 2, 1894, 2; Baseball, Toronto Evening Star, July 16, 1894, 2; Baseball Brevities, Toronto Evening Star, September 8, 1894, 7; Option runs a fast mile. Poor Attendance But Good Sport of Rosedale Track, Toronto Evening Star, July 8, 1895, 2; MLeod much in evidence, Globe, August 6, 1895, 6; By the way, Globe, February 20, 1895, 6; Toronto wins and loses, Globe, July 2, 1895, 6; Baseball, Toronto Evening Star, July 9, 1894, 2; Lacrosse, Toronto Evening Star, July 30, 1894, 2; At Hanlans Point. Great Racing on the Ferry Companys Fast Track, Toronto Evening Star, June 17, 1895, 3. 50. Encourage the league, Globe, June 9, 1894, 18; Montreal May Withdraw, Globe, May 15, 1894, 6; The Leafs are Champions, Globe, September 15, 1894, 15; By the way, Globe, December 17, 1895, 8; Ottawa at the Granite Rink, Globe, February 2, 1895, 18; By the way, Globe, June 28, 1895, 6; Baseball, Toronto Evening Star, June 7, 1894, 4; The American Derby. Great Crowds Throng Washington Park to See the Race, Toronto Evening Star, June 23, 1894, 2; New worlds record. Johnny Johnson Does the Trick at Hanlans Point, Toronto Evening Star, July 2, 1895, 2; Lacrosse, Toronto Evening Star, July 7, 1894, 2. 51. Bruce Kidd, The Political Economy of Sport (Ottawa: CAHPER, 1979), 31. 52. Montreal Caledonian Games, Globe, August 20, 1894, 6; Toronto Baseball League, Toronto Evening Star, June 30, 1894, 18; Rugbys Decline, Toronto Evening Star, October 23, 1894, 1; Rugby in 1894. Football Clubs Lost Money and Some Are Bankrupt, Toronto Evening Star, November 28, 1894, 3; Baseball Brevities, Toronto Evening Star, July 25, 1894, 2; Enormous Crowds at Soccer Games, Globe, August 30, 16; Advance Sale of Seats Is Largest of Season, Globe, January 11, 1919, 21; Random Notes on Current Sports, Toronto Evening Star, August 20, 1920, 22. 53. Leafs Split Even, New Players in Game, Biggest Crowd of the Season at Afternoon Game at Island, Toronto Evening Star, August 5, 1919, 19; Enormous Crowd at Windsor Meet, Record Attendance of 25,000 Overflows Stands and Lawns into Centrefield, Globe, July 19, 1920, 12; Biggest Crowd at Thorncliffe, Saturdays Attendance is Another New Record at Leaside Course, Globe, June 7, 1920, 16. 54. Leafs hold Wings, move slightly away from Hawks, Toronto Daily Star, February 7, 1944, 10. 55. Hockey Hawks Rolling In Dough, Toronto Daily Star, February 23, 1944, 10. 56. Lytle, Outlook very rosy for the Leafs directorate! Toronto Daily Star, February 8, 1944,

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10. 57. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, July 4, 1944, 12. 58. Coleman, Globe and Mail, November 20, 1944, 14. 59. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, January 26, 1944, 10. 60. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, March 20, 1944, 10. 61. Coleman, Globe and Mail, January 24, 1944, 14. 62. Richard Gruneau and David Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada: Sports, Identities, and Cultural Politics (Garamond Press, 1994), 67-68. 63. Sotiron, From Politics to Profit, 65. 64. Stacy L. Lorenz, A Lively Interest on the Prairies: Western Canada, the Mass Media, and a World of Sport, 1870-1939, Journal of Sport History 27, no. 2 (2000): 195. 65. Lorenz, In the Field of Sport at Home and Abroad, 149, 179. 66. Don Morrow and Kevin B. Wamsley, Sport in Canada: A History (Don Mills, Ont: Oxford University Press, 2005), 68-69; Michael Oriard, Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 112-113; Kevin G. Barnhurst and John Nerone, The Form of News: a History (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), 123-124. 67. James Barbour and William C. Dowling, The Death of the Game in Contemporary Baseball Literature, Midwest Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1986): 359. 68. James W. Carey, A Cultural Approach to Communication, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 13-36. 69. On the moral reformers of sport, see Gruneau and Whitson, Hockey Night in Canada, 66; Nancy Barbara Bouchier, For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sport in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2003), 77-78; Ian Tyrrell, Money and Morality, The Professionalisation of American Baseball, in Sport: Money, Morality and the Media, ed. Richard Cashman and Michael McKernan (Kensington, N.S.W.: University of New South Wales Press, 1981), 86. 70. Howell, Blood, Sweat and Cheers, 66. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid. 73. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, January 26, 1944, 10. 74. Ibid. 75. Confirmation, Toronto Daily Star, April 24, 1945, 12. 76. Coleman, Globe and Mail, April 14, 1944, 14. 77. Ibid. 78. Coleman, A Hoofprint on My Heart, 51. 79. Ibid., 221. 80. Coleman, Globe and Mail, February 4, 1944, 14. 81. Coleman, Globe and Mail, April 14, 1945, 16. 82. Lytle, Speaking on Sport, Toronto Daily Star, February 8, 1944, 10. 83. Schudson, The Power of News, 96. 84. Millson, Coleman made a mark in a job he loved, S6. 85. Coleman, Long Ride on a Hobby-Horse, 96. 86. Wayne Wanta, The Coverage of Sports in Print Media, in Handbook of Sports and Media,

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ed. Arthur A. Raney and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 105. 87. Garry J. Smith and Cynthia Blackman, Sport in the Mass Media (Calgary: University of Calgary, 1978), 53; Wanta, The Coverage of Sports in Print Media, 105; Lawrence Wenner, Sports and Media Through the Super Glass Mirror: Placing Blame, Breast-Beating, and a Gaze to the Future, in Handbook of Sports and Media, ed. Arthur A. Raney and Jennings Bryant (Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006), 46-47; David Rowe, Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity, 2nd ed. (Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press, 2003), 37. 88. William B. Anderson, Does the Cheerleading Ever Stop? Major League Baseball and Sports Journalism, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 78, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 355-382; David Rowe, Modes of Sportswriting, in Journalism and Popular Culture, ed. Peter Dahlgren and Colin Sparks (London: SAGE Publications, 1992), 64-83. 89. Coleman, Globe and Mail, February 1, 1944, 12; Coleman, Globe and Mail, February 16, 1944, 14. 90. Coleman, Long Ride on a Hobby-Horse, 96. 91. Burnett, Andy Lytle Was Fearless Writer, 33. 92. Trent Frayne, Tales of an Athletic Supporter (McClelland & Stewart, 1991), 308. 93. Rowe, Modes of Sportswriting, 104.