Being a huge sports fan and civil rights historian, Derek Catsam, the Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan professor in the Humanities at University of Texas Permian Basin, has penned a new book that combines those themes, politics and a whole lot more.
Not officially titled yet, its working title is “Through the Perilous Fight” with a subtitle that includes nationalism, exclusion and patriotism in American sports.
This will be Catsam’s fifth book. This is the second of a two-book deal, the first being “Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled American’s Anti-Apartheid Movement.”
His publisher is Rowman & Littlefield and “Through the Perilous Fight” is expected to come out sometime in late 2023.
“The book’s about the inevitable connections between sports and politics. And it … starts with the playing of the National Anthem at sporting events and then goes through the long history of Black struggles to be able to participate, women’s struggles to be able to participate,” Catsam said.
It ties in the National Anthem protests, the question of patriotism and the question of exclusion.
“Sports are supposed to be the sort of ultimate meritocracy and yet so much of American history, they haven’t been; so much of global history they haven’t been. Sports have been subjected to the same pressures, the same outside forces, the same bigotries, the same prejudices that all the rest of American society has. The forced exclusion of Black players in what was then our most popular sport baseball from the late 19th century through … April 1947 and the exclusion of Black players in the NFL from 1933 to 1946,” Catsam said.
He added that there are a million different racial and gender dynamics that reflect American society.
Catsam said Flashpoint was a book he really wanted to write, which is tied in with a lot of the work he’s done. He has studied at Rhodes University and has made regular visits to South Africa during the past 25 years.
He didn’t have a whole lot of time between the two books.
“You love all your books like you love your children. But … you play favorites. That last book was really important to me. … They never said we won’t publish this book without the next one, but they kind of sweetened the pot and made it much more appealing to do both books. I’ve been planning on writing a book on American sports and politics anyway. I’m still young enough that I’ll write others in the future. But this was a good time to do it, and to get it out. I think that you start reaching a point where you get five or six books and you’re in a different plane as a writer and as historian and as an academic,” Catsam said.
He said there’s a nice moment when you send the final manuscript in, but almost immediately you’re going to start getting editorial feedback.
“And then almost immediately, it’s going to feel almost immediately, you’re reviewing page proofs; and almost immediately, you’re securing photographs. And almost immediately, you’re getting people to write blurbs and almost, so there’s never a moment,” Catsam said.
“There’s the moment when the page proofs are finally done. You’ve done everything where you’re pretty close and you feel good, but by that point, it’s been five months, four months, six months of finishing up this and then by the time the book comes out, especially by the time this book comes out, I might have another book really close to written,” he added. “It’s nice to receive the box of books.”
