1 14 sportingtraditions VOLUME 22 no 2 MAY 2006

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1 1 14 sportingtraditions VOLUME 22 no 2 MAY 2006 Richard Cox, International Sport: A Bibliography, , Routledge, London, 2002, pp. 202, hb, Research and publishing in the area of sport studies has grown dramatically in recent years. The compiler of this bibliography notes that annual publications have increased from 250 to over 1000 during the last ten years. This fact both underlines the need for extensive bibliographic tools and reference works and the great challenge for compilers to make such works comprehensive, accurate, and accessible. This work builds on many significant contributions to sports bibliography by Richard Cox so he is well equipped to tackle significant bibliographic projects. In fact he has been a leading advocate for the importance of sports bibliographic studies and a commentator on standards of research and methodological practices. In Cox's own reviews of sports bibliographies he has sometimes cited the American Library Association (ALA) criteria for evaluating bibliographies. The ALA criteria include accuracy, scope, organization, methodology, annotations, and timeliness. These are sound principles for evaluating bibliographies and Richard William Cox, 'Review of Bibliography of Archery by F. Lake and H. Wright, Bibliography of the History and Organisation of Horse Racing and Thoroughbred Breeding in Great Britain and Ireland by E. P, Loder, and A Bibliography of Cricket by E. W. Padwick', British Journal of Sports History vol. 2, no.3, December 1985, pp

2 Reviews I have used them as a framework for reviewing this work. The scope of the book is ambitious and Cox readily acknowledges in his introduction that it falls a long way short of being representative of sporting publications across the world. In fact it is primarily a compilation of British works, with significant selections from other English speaking countries such as Ireland, the USA, and most of the Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand and Canada. There are 3329 entries overall and 1464 of these are from Great Britain. When the USA, Australia, and Canada are added, the total rises tojust over This still leaves about 1300 entries from other countries which is a significant number but it would be well below the total number of publications. France, 62 entries, and Germany, 42 entries, have some coverage, but others such as, Spain, Brazil, India and Russia have only a handful of entries. The entries are listed geographically firstly by continent, then down to regional, county or state divisions in the larger sections, such as Great Britain, United States and Australia. Within these sections there are further sub-sections covering general sports, reference material, Olympic and Commonwealth Games, individual sports and biographical works. Geographical or subject arrangement, or simply by author name, are generally the means of structuring bibliographies. Geography is as good a method as any although my preference would be to avoid listing items by counties or states and use some other form to distinguish entries. I would not have thought to check under Middlesex for example to find Hill and Varrasi's Creating Wembley: The Construction of a National Monument, entry 2522, and readers with only a moderate level of interest in Association Football might not have looked under Essex, entry 2301, for The Official History of West Ham United, Such works of a national dimension seem illogically placed in a section headed by a county or region. There is nothing wrong with listing works by county or state level but it may have worked better if such global oriented entities as the Manchester United FC, e.g., entries , and 2361, were listed under Association Football, and not under Lancashire. One of the joys of looking through a major bibliography is to note the range of topics encompassed and this work does not disappoint in that regard. How fascinating, bemusing, and indeed gratifying, to learn that topics such as Handball and Sexuality, entry 624, Board Games in Mesopotamia, entry 804, Shinty' (a traditional sport in Scotland), entries , Hellenic Athletic Proverbs and Maxims, entry 763, and Chivalric Physical Discourses: The Medieval Knightly System Mirrored in Codes Manesse, entry 270, are included Richard William Cox, International Sport: a Bibliography, , Routledge, London, 2004, p. ix.

3 1 16 sportingtraditions VOLUME 22 no 2 MAY 2006 here. Other gems include, The Public Image of Budo (a traditional sport of Finland), entry 1746, Dragon Boat Racing A Folk Custom Turned Competitive, entry 593, and Athletic Sports in Dalmatia from the Middle Ages to the Industrial Era, entry 818. It is not all esoteric or exotic however and there are countless entries listing general histories, reference books, conference papers and journal articles for major and minor sports, at professional and amateur level. Some entries such as Postcards from the Edge: Collected Mountaineering Writings, entry 674, or the Annotated Bibliography of Traditional Games and Play in Africa, entry 820, struck me as particularly useful to have discovered from a librarian's point ofview. How comprehensive is this bibliography? It does not describe itself as a comprehensive listing of all international publications for the period covered, The entries from other countries while useful are to some extent a token sample. It would be nearly an impossible task to compile a globally comprehensive bibliography so I do not offer this as a criticism of the work. What is more important is how comprehensive are the sections which are seemingly well covered. This is a difficult question to answer unless one has a prodigious knowledge of international sporting publications. One way to form a view is to examine an area in which you have some familiarity. So, I immediately checked the entries for Australia, and Australian Rules football in particular. Here I found a fairly thin selection of items. There were a total of 99 entries for Australia, sixteen of these were for Australian Rules football. This is well below the number ofworks published between 1995 and 1999, at least 300 by my estimate. Other sports are very poorly represented. There are two cricket biographies, one of these an article, and one item on golf. A less than systematic search on the Libraries Australia online union catalogue indicated over 600 books, covering a handful of major sports in Australia between One wonders why the selection is so slim given the availability of union lists, indexing services and more recently online catalogues. Some other areas also appear very thin. There are only two works listed under India, and surprisingly neither of these are about cricket, eight items on ice hockey in Canada, and seven entries for golf in the USA, all much less than expected. Some major international sporting stars are not included. For example biographies of golfer Tiger Woods, and cycling legend Miguel Indurain, both ofwhich are listed on the British Library catalogue. Their omission is curious given their stature in those sports. If sporting figures of this prominence have been missed it does sow a seed of doubt in your 3 John Strege, A Biography of Tiger Woods, Broadway Books, New York, Pablo Munuz, Miguel Indurain: A Life on Wheels, trans. Adrian Bell, MR Norwich, 1998.

4 Reviews confidence in the coverage of the bibliography. There are several other similar omissions including works by, or about major international sporting stars such as basketball players Michael Jordan and Wilt Chamberlain, boxers Mike Tyson, Joe Louis, and some listed for Muhammad Ali, but not Ali in Britain by Michael Tanner. Cricketers Sunil Gavaskar and Brian Lara, British tennis players, Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski, cyclist Eddy Merckx, Graeme Fife's Tour de France: The History, the Legend, the Riders, and British round the world yachtsman Tony Bullimore are also missing. All of these were easily found on major library online catalogues such as the New York Public Library and the National Library of Australia. It appears that these works were not omitted on the basis of scholarly standards. In fact in the introduction Cox states, 'length and level of scholarship are no longer considerations ofwhat is left in or left out' as they had been in his previous bibliographies. 6 Cox mentions the pressure to compile lists as soon as possible in the introduction, yet the bibliography covering , was not published until I can only think there has been a great reliance on publishers' current catalogues, close to the time of publication, and less retrospective checking of library catalogues some months later when more works would have found their way into libraries. A bibliography which fails to include works about so many major sports stars, including global figures such as Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods has major flaws in terms of it being a comprehensive bibliography. In terms of the ALA criteria, comprehensive coverage has been sacrificed at the expense of timeliness. One area which has not been covered, deliberately it seems, are works of fiction, particularly novels, plays, and films with a sporting theme or setting. See for example, Waiter LeFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism, W.W. Norton, New York, 1999; Wilt Chamberlain, Who's Running the Asylum? Inside the Insane World of Sports Today, Promotion Pub., San Diego, CA, 1997; Reg Gutteridge and Norman Giller, Mike Tyson: The Release of Power, Queen Anne Press, London, 1998; Michael Tanner, Ali in Britain, Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1995; Richard Bak, Joe Louis: the Great Black Hope, De Capo Press, New York, 1998; Clifford Narinesingh, Gavaskar: Portrait of a Hero, Royards Publishing, Trinidad, 1996; Brian Lara and Brian Scovell, Beating the Field, Partridge, London, 1995; Neil Harman, Duel for the Crown, Andre Deutsch, London, 1999 (Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski Tennis); Rik Vanwalleghem, Eddy Merckx: the Greatest Cyclist of the 20th Century trans. Steve Hawkins, Velo Press, Boulder, CO, 1996; Graeme Fife, Tour de France: the History the Legend, the Riders, Mainstream, Edinburgh, 1999; Tony Bullimore, Saved, Warner, London, Richard William Cox, International Sport: a Bibliography , Routledge, London, 2004, p. ix.

5 1 18 sportingtraditions VOLUME 22 no 2 MAY 2006 This is a pity as this is a growing field in terms of output and scholarship. There are no annotations in this bibliography which is unfortunate as they add much value, even if they are brief. No doubt if annotations were attempted the number of works listed would have been substantially reduced and breadth of coverage at the expense of quality is not without merit. As for the accuracy of the entries the ones I am familiar with were correct, and a random check of others indicated no discrepancies. In conclusion the coverage of academic literature in this work appears to be more comprehensive than the coverage of material written for a more general readership. As a resource for finding scholarly literature it is a very useful tool. As a general compendium of sporting literature it is not comprehensive enough. The aims of the work need to be more clearly identified so the appropriate balance between a comprehensive listing, up-to-date coverage, and the criteria for selection can be achieved. Is it a compilation of scholarly literature, or a general compendium? If it is a compendium then a check of the online catalogues of major libraries would indicate a wider selection of material than has been listed here. Given the vast amount of material being published a more selective approach which aimed at comprehensive coverage within a narrower criteria might result in a more useful and coherent compilation. Despite my comments about the slim coverage in various areas, and many major omissions, this is still a formidable selection of material and Cox is to be commended for compiling works of this scope. Tim Hogan Newspaper Librarian, State Library of Victoria