Sports in Boston. Sports in the Thesis.

Posted October 15, 2021 by William Crouch

As I bet most of you reading know, Boston is very much a sports city. With the Red Sox and Celtics both being historic teams in baseball and basketball respectively and the Patriots being the dominant force they have been for 20 years, Boston’s love of sports speaks for itself. One of the really cool things I got the chance to do recently was attend a fairly new sporting event in Boston, the Laver Cup. The Laver Cup is a pretty new tennis tournament that attracts the biggest stars to come play as Team Europe takes on Team World. Some of the biggest names in tennis like Federer, Nadal, Djokovic have all played the Laver Cup before. In 2019, the Laver Cup announced that Boston was to be the host site of the 2020 edition of the Laver Cup. I’m a pretty avid tennis fan myself. I played in undergrad for the Austin College ‘Roos and took the sport back up during the pandemic with my dad. When the opportunity came to get tickets for the Laver Cup, I snagged some as quickly as possible. That was back in March 2020. Literally days before the pandemic shut everything down. But the Laver Cup insisted on staying in Boston for the next time it would be held and came here in September. It was amazing! I got to see some of the best tennis players in the world and watch just how good professional tennis actually is. In the same week, I also got to attend a Red Sox game at Fenway! The Red Sox have a special discount for students that lets you purchase tickets for $10 a piece for certain games. That was also just absolutely incredible. Seeing a game at the nation’s oldest ballpark is a sports memory that I’ll hold onto forever. And with the Red Sox having just secured a spot in the American League Championship Series for a chance to play in the World Series, there’s going to be some great baseball coming up in the Simmons area in the next few weeks!

That’s a long segue into how my thesis is evolving. When writing any work, it’s expected that it will change over time, but the thesis can literally change total focus as you are writing it. In my case, while I initially wanted to focus on Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, I found a much more compelling story in Althea Gibson, the first Black Wimbledon champion, and why she seems to be becoming a historical footnote in tennis. So my thesis has slightly shifted to examining Althea Gibson’s memory within sports compared to figures like Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Jackie Robinson and Wilma Rudolph. I’m still a long way away from finishing and the thesis will certainly change a lot before I’m finished but I’m taking it step by step to eventually achieve a larger goal. This past weekend as well, I was able to travel to NYC to do some research in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture by looking through the Arthur Ashe Papers. That was my first real experience doing archival research for a major project like this and it was awesome to see the items that Ashe actually owned and what was important to him. Part of the point of this blog has been to show future thesis writers and students in our program that while there is a lot of work, it does not have to be an ever present source of anxiety. While I have so far been able to develop my research and thesis, I still have been able to do outside things for fun. I did bring books to both the Laver Cup and Red Sox game, but there always needs to be a place for time to relax, no matter what it is for you. I know I forgot to include the ONE Simmons project again (sorry!) I promise it will be coming in a future blog.