“You remember the Matthews Final in ’53?” Nick Hornby asks in his semiautobiographical memoir of football fandom, Fever Pitch (1992). The question kicks off a quick list of storied moments any good fan is supposed to be able to recall, even if they predate the fan’s birth: “Bert Trautmann playing in goal with a broken neck in ’56? Tottenham’s Double team in ’61? Everton’s comeback in ’66? Osgood’s diving header in ’70?” Hornby thought such heroism was long gone by the time he had grown up. “Now watch Storey and Bremner attempting to gouge lumps out of each other’s thighs,” he noted in dry comparison (65).

Historians of football and other sports have spent the last thirty years exploding and deconstructing the mythic sense of nostalgia that informs Hornby’s declension narrative. More recent, however, is scholarly interest in how people have constructed (and continue to construct) these narratives in the first place. Over the last five years, more than a dozen books and articles have examined the historical memory of sport, exploring a range of documentary, visual, and material culture evidence from recent years as well as the more distant past in an effort to uncover the processes and meanings of commemorating sport. Sport, History, and Heritage features new pieces by several leaders in this movement, along with articles from younger scholars. The essays came out of a series of workshops held from 2006 to 2008, funded by Britain’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.

The book’s seventeen articles fall into three distinct units. “History, Heritage, and Sport” examines the construction of historical memory in a variety of settings, from the literary discourse of cricket in late-Victorian and Edwardian England to the paintings submitted for the Football Association Art Competition in 1953, the BBC’s television coverage of the 1948 London Olympics, and a 2011 exhibit created by the London Ex-Boxers Association to highlight boxing’s place in the long history of East End working-class culture. The next section, “Museums and Representation of Sport,” contains case study examinations of exhibits and their development in formal museum settings. Subjects range from the British Golf Museum in St. Andrews to the revamped museum at Wimbledon and an exhibit of Everton’s archival collection at the Liverpool Central Library. Finally, “Survivals and Legacies” delves into the role of stadia as commemorative spaces, with articles covering Anfield, Croke Park and the Gaelic Athletic Association, and Olympic venues throughout Europe and America.

The editors’ brief introduction frames the entire anthology as an exploration of the tension between “history” and “heritage,” shorthand terms for academic method and critical analysis on one hand and a more “unproblematic” version of “popular historical consciousness” on the other (3–4). The book’s impressive breadth of subject matter allows readers to see this tension, though it often emerges from comparing articles rather than as an explicit theme within each essay. In part, the wide variety of approaches reflects the diverse backgrounds of the volume’s authors. One-third of the contributors are museum professionals, many of whom detail the processes and rationales behind particular exhibits without critically examining those processes and rationales. Academics might be inclined to write off these descriptions, but as editor Moore (director of the National Football Museum and one of the few scholars who bridges the chasm between academic and public sport history) has pointed out in the foreword to another anthology (Murray G. Phillips, ed., Representing the Sporting Past [New York, 2012]), academics should be more interested in using museum professionals’ experiences to explore the making of “heritage” than they are with simply critiquing that “heritage” as bad “history.”

If the essays from museum professionals are steeped in “heritage,” the articles from academics tend to focus on the history of the heritage so much that they miss the tension between the two. An examination of stadium memorials outlines commemorations of Manchester United’s 1958 Munich air disaster, as well as the Hillsborough and Heysel stadium tragedies, but it offers no conclusions about how the material form of the memorials might guide these commemorations. The piece on the BBC’s 1948 Olympics television coverage opens by comparing those “Austerity Games” to the 2012 version taking place amid government spending cuts, then quickly drops this comparison in favor of describing the nature of the programming, the commentary, and the public’s reception of it all in 1948. The article only returns to the comparison to make an unsatisfying point that both the 1948 and the 2012 BBC officials saw the Games as a platform for introducing new technology (Internet video, in the case of 2012). Several of these articles have the feel of being cut down from much longer essays and, as a result, address more material than can be fruitfully distilled in ten to twenty pages.

Despite this criticism, there are articles that capture the full tension between history and heritage. The opening piece on the Rugby Football Union’s persistent use of the William Webb Ellis founding myth and David Storey’s analysis of the Gaelic Athletic Association both address how sport organizations manipulate history to construct a commercially viable heritage. Again, though, even when individual articles do not address the tension so fully, the volume overall contains such a range of approaches that readers can hardly miss the tension’s value as a way to compare and consider the essays together. The only real critique of this framing, then, is that its wide lens obscures how memory can vary dramatically among different groups experiencing the same event. Other than a few superficial references to the recent growth of women’s sport, the volume misses what Hornby recalls as “the overwhelming maleness of it all” (19).

In the end, then, Sport, History, and Heritage is primarily a primer of approaches, methods, and sources for examining the historical memory of sport, writ large. Yet readers of the Journal of British Studies who are not interested in sport or memory will find useful new research on the local neighborhood and fan cultures described in the fifteen essays that address the British Isles. Architecture and library visitation in Liverpool, as well as understudied groups in places as distinct as the East End and provincial golf clubs represent the kinds of topics that might hold broader appeal. And then, too, there is always the valuable reminder to historians that the public approaches history very differently than we do. “I rarely think,” Hornby writes in Fever Pitch. “I remember, I try to visualize” (10).