Chicago Sports Museum

If a banal real estate metaphor—that location is everything—can be applied more widely, then the location of the Chicago Sports Museum is telling. Situated on the seventh floor of a downtown shopping mall on the Windy City's Magnificent Mile, the museum celebrates the spectacle of consumer sport in Chicago. It is unabashedly commercial, both in the moments and men (almost exclusively) it celebrates. Adjacent to an eatery named after famed local broadcaster Harry Caray, the museum is in large part a diversion intended to attract and entertain diners and tourists.Chicago was host to the 2022 meeting of the North American Society for Sport History, many of whose members have played a leading role in chronicling and critiquing the history of sport in the city (e.g., Gerry Gems, Gabe Logan, Michael Lomax). Regardless, the Chicago Sports Museum makes no claim to represent sport's role in urban and neighborhood development or consider the class, gender, ethnic, and racial tension that characterized the emergence of modern sport. While the museum could do much more as a site of public history—to engage visitors and illuminate the history of sport in the city—it is perhaps unproductive to discuss what the Chicago Sports Museum could be and instead engage with what it is.The museum is composed of two large rooms separated by smaller transitional spaces. Entering into the first room, visitors are invited to marvel at the remarkable feats of Chicago's (male) sporting heroes. The panel on the Chicago Bears’ star running back Walter Payton asks “how strong are you?” while at the same time making clear that the visitor could not possibly match Payton's strength or his on-field success. This rhetorical device continues: pitchers Greg Maddux and Mark Buehrle, neither of whom possessed overwhelming fastballs, are celebrated for their sporting intellect as the answers to “how strategic are you?” The reflexes of Hall of Fame hockey goaltender Tony Esposito animate the question “how quick are you?” Visitors are also invited to measure their wingspan against that of Chicago Bulls’ star Scottie Pippen and contemplate “how big are you?” Bearing witness to sport's larger-than-life stature is a pair of size 28 sneakers and basketballs marked with the enormous handprints of famed players. Nearby, visitors are encouraged to measure their vertical leap against a mural of Pippen's teammate Michael Jordan preparing to dunk a basketball. That most feats of brawn and biology are represented by Black athletes while cunning and guile are portrayed in the achievements of white athletes reproduces cultural stereotypes, however unintentionally.The connecting spaces between the two main rooms highlight elements of fandom and the history of Chicago sport, including Caray's broadcasting—particularly his off-key rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”—famed “curses” that have befallen local teams—most notoriously the World Series “billy goat” curse that apparently doomed the Cubs to 71 years of failure—and the details of the Black Sox scandal, where members of the White Sox were accused of taking money from gamblers to throw the 1919 World Series.In the museum's second main room, the emphasis is almost exclusively on the four major North American team sports, in particular Chicago's franchises in the NBA, NFL, and NHL, as well as the city's two major-league baseball teams. Local professional soccer receives considerably less coverage. Individual sports, the long history of amateur sport in the city, and Chicago's selection as the initial host for the 1904 Olympics (eventually held in St. Louis) as well as the city's bid for the 2016 Olympics are entirely absent. The only display case to focus specifically on women's participation in the local sport scene highlights the Soxettes, “a group of young women chosen to be ambassadors” who, in 1973, “promoted the White Sox on the radio, at home games, baseball clinics, parades and dinners throughout the Chicagoland area.” On display are the tools of such diplomatic efforts, including a pinstriped tunic with short shorts and red vinyl go-go boots. This room also includes interactive videogame stations that encourage museumgoers to emulate the feats of their heroes. These, combined with the anatomical statistics and biometric markers from the first room, are intended to inspire visitors to marvel at the superhuman achievements of Chicago sporting legends.This focus on celebrating achievements encourages a consideration of what a sport museum should or can be (a question to which NASSH scholars have also contributed). As Rachel Morris contends in The Museum Makers, museums allow us to consider who we are, where we've come from, and what we've accomplished. While there is a critique of the notions of “progress” inherent in these themes and the disciplinary nature of museums (see Tony Bennett's The Birth of the Museum), there remains an expectation that museums operate as repositories of artifacts, representations of cultural practices and history, and signposts of what a society has achieved or aspires to be.At the Chicago Sports Museum, tales of the Cubs and White Sox (as one example), while celebrated in Chicago, obscure the centrality of the city to the origins of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, its long-standing Negro National League team, the American Giants, and the East-West All-Star Game, held annually at Comiskey Park. Nor does a wall of framed newspaper covers include anything from the Defender, Chicago's Black newspaper, or influential sportswriter Wendell Smith. One is left aspiring to be a larger-than-life hero, but with less sense of what sport has meant to the cultural fabric of the city and its many communities.

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