For this week I focused my attention on reading the article by Roberta J. Park. This reading focuses on the impact of sports in the development of social values in countries where they are bought and I feel the above quote really encompasses the true meaning of the piece. Though perhaps giving too much focus on America for an article that focuses elsewhere this quote is useful for revealing the intention to spread sports and the ways in which they are used in this article. Even in positions where the reading steps away from Americanization it still uses sports as a means to instill values in a country’s people. Early on in the article introduces the concept of Manifest Destiny, the idea is usually applied to only the American Continent but it does stand for American expansion. Manifest Destiny is simply used as an introduction, the article quickly shifts its focus to America’s involvement with the Caribbean and the sports that were brought along with it.
Likely the most relevant examples from the text to show the role of sports in instilling values in a people would be their existence and prevalence in schools, specifically for the purposes of this blog post, the island of Puerto Rico. The reading goes out of its way to mention the sports that had been prevalent on the island before American sports were introduced and goes on to speak on how the example of baseball spread throughout the island’s schools.
To hearken back to American involvement in the island’s sports one could look to the position of Physical Education, that being the fact that it fell out of practice and was only given a resurgence at the same time as American schools were revitalizing their own physical education programs. The YMCA is frequently mentioned in this text and it is noted within the text that the program refused to give its support towards sports that were played on Sunday, likely meaning the program was based around Christianity. To push attention back to Puerto Rico itself, when sports threatened to overwhelm the schedules of the countries young people a sports journal found it important to state that athletes should always be involved in some form of schooling.
This perhaps random grab bag of examples is meant to show the different ways that those in power or with influence in sports used their influence in an attempt to instill a certain set of values in those who enjoyed sports. It just so happens that many of the values seem like those upheld in America at the time this reading refers to.
