In his third book, Contested Identities: The Struggle for Canadian Sport, former distance runner Bruce Kidd, who now directs the School of Physical and Health Education at the University of Toronto, argues that sports and rampant commercialism were not always bedfellows.

Kidd hones in on four sporting organizations that sprung up between the wars: the Amateur Athletic Union, which saw sport as a tool for fashioning real men; the Women’s Amateur Athletic Federation, whose members fought for a league of their own; the socialist Workers’ Sport Association, whose teams consisted solely of left wingers; and the National Hockey League, which Kidd portrays as the big bad bully that transformed Canadian sport from an honourable avocation into an empty capitalist spectacle.

Unfortunately, what Kidd ignores is that sports culture is shaped less by bureaucrats and committees than by flesh-and-blood heroes. When confidence in baseball was shattered after the Black Sox scandal of 1919, for example, it was Babe Ruth who single-handedly won back the fans, not the commissioner’s crackdown. While the organizations Kidd profiles no doubt influenced the prevailing climate of their day, he is unconvincing in arguing that they “have shaped the structure of Canadian sport as much as anything before or since.”

Kidd justly points out that non-capitalist philosophies of sport were smothered by the NHL’s dominance, but it is nonsense to suggest that Hockey Night in Canada “contributed significantly to the ‘symbolic annihilation’ of women from public policy and everyday discourse about sports.”

This might have been more palatable had Kidd demonstrated some narrative or journalistic energy. Instead, he writes with all the crackle of a government policy paper, illustrating his points with either turgid jargon (“hegemony” is a favourite) or anecdotal reminiscences (“My great aunt…regularly played [tennis] at her church in Yarmouth”).

To be fair, Kidd’s study is well documented and his research appears to be quite sweeping. In that respect, it may provide students of Canadian social history with some edifying fodder. But given its pedestrian style and dubious argument, it is difficult to imagine that the interested layperson would derive any value from Contested Identities.