North America's Indian peoples have always viewed competitive sport
as something more than a pastime. The northeastern Indians'
ball-and-stick game that would become lacrosse served both symbolic
and practical functions-preparing young men for war, providing an
arena for tribes to strengthen alliances or settle disputes, and
reinforcing religious beliefs and cultural cohesion. Today a
multimillion-dollar industry, lacrosse is played by colleges and
high schools, amateur clubs, and two professional leagues. In
Lacrosse: A History of the Game, Donald M. Fisher traces the
evolution of the sport from the pre-colonial era to the founding in
2001 of a professional outdoor league-Major League Lacrosse-told
through the stories of the people behind each step in lacrosse's
development: Canadian dentist George Beers, the father of the
modern game; Rosabelle Sinclair, who played a large role in the
1950s reinforcing the feminine qualities of the women's game;
"Father Bill" Schmeisser, the Johns Hopkins University coach who
worked tirelessly to popularize lacrosse in Baltimore; Syracuse
coach Laurie Cox, who was to lacrosse what Yale's Walter Camp was
to football; 1960s Indian star Gaylord Powless, who endured racist
taunts both on and off the field; Oren Lyons and Wes Patterson, who
founded the inter-reservation Iroquois Nationals in 1983; and Gary
and Paul Gait, the Canadian twins who were All-Americans at
Syracuse University and have dominated the sport for the past
decade. Throughout, Fisher focuses on lacrosse as contested ground.
Competing cultural interests, he explains, have clashed since
English settlers in mid-nineteenth-century Canada first
appropriated and transformed the "primitive" Mohawk game of
tewaarathon, eventually turning it into a respectable "gentleman's"
sport. Drawing on extensive primary research, he shows how amateurs
and professionals, elite collegians and working-class athletes,
field- and box-lacrosse players, Canadians and Americans, men and
women, and Indians and whites have assigned multiple and often
conflicting meanings to North America's first-and fastest
growing-team sport.
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