Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport 1807-1914

Robert Barney was Professor of Physical Education at the University of Western Ontario in London.

Canada Learns to Play is an important book in the Canadian Social History Series published by McClelland and Stewart. Alan Metcalfe has produced an authoritative interpretation on the incidence of sport, games, and play in Canadian life between 1807 and 1914. A highly reputable, indeed a distinguished historian of sport in Canada for over two decades, Metcalfe, more than any other individual, is the scholar best prepared and armed to write this particular chapter in Canadian history. For some 25 years, Metcalfe has been concerned with various societal and cultural considerations present in Canadian history which have gone hand-in-hand with determining the nation’s sporting fabric. Though not the strongest and most gregarious writer among sport historians (by his own admission), there are few, however, who penetrate primary sources and research data and systematically flesh out substantive conclusions buried therein as well as does Alan Metcalfe. Like any historian worth his salt, Metcalfe has asked questions of his data. And, in most instances, he is objective in providing answers.

In Canada Learns to Play, the author begins by analyzing the bedrock foundation of the sporting experience in Canadian history — the form and function of sporting pastime as set in place by British influences (the pro-British French were of little influence in the greater scheme of things). Prior to Confederation, and for some time after, the power and authority of organized sport resided with elitist segments of society — military officers and well-to-do merchants. Metcalfe’s next consideration is a study of the development of social sporting clubs, particularly in the urban centres of Montreal and Toronto. In an otherwise quite sterile literary style, Metcalfe waxes both eloquent and impassioned in his treatment of a theme which obviously involves his emotions more than any other. Succeeding chapters devoted to the emergence of organized team sport, the growth of organizations and the evolution of amateurism, and the rise of professionalism and commercial sport, all lay a stable foundation for understanding the Canadian sporting world in which we reside today.

I have waited for quite some time to see this Metcalfe effort in print. For the most part my patience has been rewarded. This is a good, thorough, scholarly effort, one that is and may well be for some time a benchmark work. Although not exactly of Churchillian grandeur in its literary style, Metcalfe’s prose should be understandable to general readers as well as to serious scholars, but the work will appeal primarily to academically-oriented individuals. There is a handsome array of source citation —newspapers, club records and minutes, federal and provincial archival material, etc. The book has a thorough index. On the debit side is a paucity of illustrative material. There are but 8 illustrations in a work of some 250 pages. This may be due to editorial limitations, but a picture is worth a thousand words, and I believe that any author under any circumstances must be sensitive to this when conveying ideas and impressions to readers. Nor does Metcalfe delineate his research methodologies. In this work I perceive several approaches. And, finally, Dulles’s America Learns to Play (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965) came to mind. The similarity of the two titles prompted me to make comparisons between the two works as I progressed through the text. This was somewhat disconcerting. Metcalfe’s is a better work than Dulles’s. It deserves a more distinguished title to underscore its better quality. And Canadians did not learn to play (neither did Americans). Play is inherent. Social and cultural forces stimulate its occurrence. Thus, how about: The Urge to Sport: Canadians at Play, 1807-1914?