Research project hits a home run

Napoléon 'Larry' Lajoie is a curious figure in sports history. He holds the American League record for single-season batting average at .422 and had a lifetime average of .339.

A powerhouse hitter, Lajoie was the first player to be intentionally walked with the bases loaded. He was so popular in the early part of the 20th century that his fans voted to change the name of the Cleveland Broncos to the Naps (after Napoléon), before the team was again renamed the Indians. Lajoie's 1901 baseball card is reportedly worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and one sport historian has called him the first modern American sports celebrity of any stripe.

Lajoie's star, however, has long faded into obscurity. His contemporaries, Cy Young and Ty Cobb, are far more familiar names. Dr. Claude Couture, director of Canadian Studies at Faculté Saint-Jean has a theory about that.

"He had French-Canadian origins, and people can't pronounce his name," explained Couture. "That's why he was called Larry Lajoie, because people were butchering his name, and at one point someone called him Larry instead of Lajoie."

Couture is, of course, only half serious. The construction of Lajoie as a sports hero (or lack thereof) is a complicated problem, but one worth unraveling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is a better understanding of who we are as Canadians and Americans.

The American Fulbright Program also thinks Lajoie's story is worth pursuing, awarding Couture a $25,000 (US) Fulbright Award to spend a year at the Jackson School (international studies) of Washington University in Seattle. He is the only senior U of A professor to win the prestigious award, meant to enhance understanding between the United States and Canada. The planned result is a book on national identities and sport to be released in the fall of 2005.

"In order to understand Canadian identity or French-Canadian identity or American identity, most of the work is done through political literature and institutions," said Couture. "But what I'm trying to do here is propose an interpretation of identity through the history of sport, based on the principle that sport produced very key narratives in the process of forging national identities."

Couture will therefore compare newspaper accounts of Lajoie's career in the Canadian and American press between 1896 and 1917, specifically the Globe and La Presse on the one hand, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Cleveland News on the other. He has already conducted the first part of the study, a comparison of the ways in which the press built a discourse around Lajoie as a national hero in Ontario and Quebec, especially after he retired from the American League in 1916 to manage and play for the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team.

At the height of the conscription crisis in Canada in 1917, there was considerable tension between French and English Canadians. But when the Maple Leafs were playing in Toronto, one-third of the fans in the stands were French Canadian, and everyone, French and English alike, cheered on Lajoie and his team.

"On the front page of the Globe you have this debate about conscription and almost vilification of the French Canadians who don't want conscription, then on the sports page you have Lajoie, this great hero. It's a fascinating contradiction," Couture said.

Another contradiction arises in the American press. Lajoie was the child of Quebec textile workers forced to leave the province to find work in New England. Lajoie himself worked in a textile plant and fit neatly into baseball's affinity with the working class and the larger myth of the American dream. But when Lajoie once got into a fight with a teammate, the scribes immediately evoked his Gallic blood. He was at once 'one of us' and foreign to Americans.

The focus on Lajoie, however, will be just part of a more general examination of the role of sport in creating national mythologies, Couture said. How, for example, did baseball come to be America's national sport when it was just as popular in Canada until the second half of the 20th century?

In fact, he said, "it wasn't clear that hockey was more popular than baseball until the First World War." The main reason for America's lock on baseball was an odd American Supreme Court decision in 1922 that allowed major league baseball to escape anti-trust laws. "The monopoly was centered in the states, with no room for Canada. At the same time, hockey was becoming popular, so the decision left open possibilities for other sports."

One irony is that, in Lajoie's day, Quebec was regarded as a haven for talented black baseball players who wanted to escape discrimination. "It shows how complex our societies are, because Quebec is supposed to be this deeply racist society, and then all of a sudden you realize there was this more tolerant place for black players in Quebec.So from the history of sport, you can address larger issues about societies."

Couture admits many are skeptical of his line of research, one that looks to popular culture and its icons to shed light on complex social issues, regarding it as 'disconnected' from reality. But he defends cultural study, arguing that it often reveals truths more profound than do many forms of scientific inquiry.

"I would say the kind of work some people do in arts about culture is even more connected to reality than a very specialized and narrow technology, which is far from the daily life of anybody."