Esa Sironen, Pekka Kärkkäinen & Martti Silvennoinen

LIKES-Research Center for Sport and Health Sciences

Jyväskylä - Finland

When paper-making engineers from Central Europe were, after a sultry factory circuit in July in the 1980s, taken to Laajavuori, a hill in the area of Jyväskylä, to admire the mountain views opening from there - it is a local custom to bring visitors there1 - from the bushes around the upper cable end of the ski lift appeared, clothed in his jump overalls and carrying his skis on his shoulder, Matti Nykänen. The reigning world ski jumping champion was spending the summer evening by exercising. The guide had just finished telling how it was from this jump, "the big concrete", that the town's little big man, Matti Nykänen, had jumped for the first time when he was thirteen.

Cameras began to rattle and the visitors asked Matti whether they could take a picture of him. Matti gave a friendly wave with his hand - this is a true story, you see - and said that could it wait for another time.

Not much happened and the picture was never taken either. But a story was born - a little present to take to the folks at home and to be circulated further. That kind of thing breaks nicely the routine course of everyday life in the same way as a waterfall breaks the sleepy flow of a river.

Figure 1. "Towards a critical regionalism." On the background the top of the ski jump, named after Matti Nykänen in Jyväskylä (Photo Mikko Hietaharju)

What seems small may also be far-reaching and tenacious. Past cultures, even after people are dead and things destroyed, may still leave behind some ornamental ribbon pattern, a nursery rhyme or a short melody from a folk song. It has been carried along partly as a blind habit, but partly, one may assume, also as a kind of small treasure.

Maybe this reveals something about the philosophy of history at its most profound, or at any rate as its most topical.

A new image of the past

"It is the age of postmodernism" said the headline of an article in Helsingin Sanomat, the main daily in Finland, in 21 March 1997. It told what the Russian critic Vjatsheslav Kuritsyn from Sverdlovsk means by postmodernism. Kuritsyn does not believe "in the need of a grand global theory in the real world of today", but recommends instead an approach characterized by an "affectionate attitude towards the phenomena of life", an interest in "small and trivial things".2

An apt description, but not a particularly new one. Similar views have been expressed as (self-)criticism of modernity since the belief in global theory, grand narratives and theoretical abstractions began to crumble - at least from Georg Simmel if not from Friedrich Nietzsche, in other words since the turn of the century.

Walter Benjamin developed in the 1920s an interest in "small and trivial things" into a guideline for his methodical gaze, later expressed in a pointed form in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" as the conception that "the true picture of the past flits by".3 That is one historical form of existence for things that are small and ephemeral but far from negligible.

Today history is being rethought as microhistory, locality, autobiography, even anecdotal history. Such strivings have also already acquired distinct national features and practices reminiscent of history workshops and popular movements (in England, Germany, Sweden, and even in Finland).4 These new viewpoints have meant the increasing stratification of historical perception and a new focus precisely on Kuritsyn's "small and trivial things".

It may be a reaction to the break in tradition brought about by social modernization. Such a reaction would involve sharpening our sense of history along lines already being laid down by Benjamin in his theses when he developed the concept of memory "as it flashes up at a moment of danger" - when individual or social memory is under threat.

We may ask whether the new interest named by Kuritsyn in fact represents postmodernism. Often it is, rather, a return to the tradition of storytelling, not necessarily to Dickensian realism but, with equal likelihood, to surrealism, Kafka's short novels or the anecdotes of Procopius.

We may also ask whether it represents the opposite of or an alternative to grand global theory. It need not be either. Buying bread is a step towards the global grain market, as microhistorians are wont to say.5

When stories larger than life and abstractions tuned too high have been emptied of meaning and become immobilised in concrete, it is still possible to find the spark of meaning, hidden among the junk and marginal stuff cast onto the roadside, in the form of Benjamin's "chips of the Messianic",6 or as a barely distinguishable trace and clue of the kind that Ernst Bloch, Carlo Ginzburg and even E.P.Thompson7 have taught us to read. It may also be dug up as a coal that may be made to glow again by being blown on.

Such ideas may be of use in sport and sport history when sport history attempts to gain a fresh perspective and keep abreast of the times instead of being content either with dead and expensive monuments or mere entertainment.

Sensual pleasures of history

A nearly non-existent fragment may recall to mind whole past ages, as in the case of Marcel Proust: the forgotten taste of madeleine awakened the lost childhood eaten away by time. The audiovisual equivalent of "small and trivial things" are swiftly fleeting instants. In our own pursuit of local and small-scale sport history we have run into instants of this kind in at least two or three forms.

First, during interviews with sport veterans we noticed a recurrent pattern. We have made an appointment and the interviewee first tells us a mentally prepared history of his own sport or of "our club" with its series of victories and defeats. It has the feel of something learned from books and speeches, the grand global theory of sport. Once that is over and done with the interviewee relaxes and begins informally to relate all kinds of small and trivial things.

Assuming that the tape recorder is still on it now and then records juicy little stories that just get better once the recorder has finally been packed in its case. The merciless and even slightly off-colour anecdote comes in the hall as we are throwing our coats on.

These "ethnomethodological" little tales make up the unpublished and in part even unpublishable "folk history" of a sport, sports facility or club. It surfaces in annual sports festivals as soon as the speeches have been delivered and the medals given and the veterans have picked up their coffee cups and retired to enjoy each other's company.

Figure 2. "Global, National, Local". Hannes Kolehmainen, the Hero of the Stockholm Olympic Games 1912, in Hippos, Jyväskylä, in the year 1922 (Photo: The Museum of Middle Finland).

It is then that they remember how Hannes Kolehmainen, the hero of the 1912 Stockholm Olympics who "ran Finland onto the map of the world"8 competed ten years later on the then primitive Jyväskylä sports ground, the swampy Hippos track, and how the local businessmen gave him the prize of a horse rake. They may also remember how the local young rascals ran, all the rest of the summer, like Kolehmainen, rotating their right hand from the wrist. It was supposed to make you run faster.

We have tried systematically to gather such anecdotes belonging to an oral tradition linked with a few locally memorable sports, sports facilities and clubs and to record the moment of their telling. They formed the basis of a radio series broadcast weekly over the course of half an year (1992, repeat broadcast 1995), processed with the help of a studio whose resources a local radio station offered us. A broader public was thus given an opportunity to hear things previously reserved to the ears of a few select initiates.

Such anecdotes are as a rule sharp short tales bound up with a person and a situation. However, they are not just something private and local, something valid only in Jyväskylä or Sverdlovsk, the opposite of general. Instead, when they hit their target, they vary and specify the general, representing in philosophical terms, the "particular". Cultural anthropology, following in the footsteps of Clifford Geertz, calls them "local knowledge".9

Figures 3 and 4 . "A rush to the base". An episode on the videodocument "The baseball rage", 1995, directed by Esa Sironen. (Photo Matti Salmi)

Sport is serious enough a business to acquire the golden lining of anecdotal stories. To be sure, there are misses, too. But a good anecdote seems to be able to withstand decades of circulation. Some have maintained that humour is a sign of realism. Those who do not understand a joke are unable to make realistic sense of things. It is a definition in which we trust.

To the moving pictures

The second and the third way in which the past flashed by us in a wink, we experienced on those same collection trips. Private photograph albums revealed snapshots that expressed moods different from the posed pictures of official sports history. They had been taken with a cheap camera level with the subject, and they often incorporated some point of misfit, a punctum (Roland Barthes),10 which irresistibly commands attention, strikes or even "pierces", and which cannot be left alone.

Some home video cassette contained a messy bit of local ski jumping in the 1950s. We began to hunt the original reel of tape, which turned out to be a clear and sharp three-minute record of a competition. We organized an identification parade to which we invited old ski jumpers and aficionados of the sport. We made a separate video recording of our interviews with our most important informants.

Luckily the local cable television company was feeling guilty about not being local enough. They decided to exploit our small group and gave us technical support. It was needed, for only an adequate standard of image and sound makes possible proper cutting and broadcasting and, consequently, the preparation of a document that bears watching and being re-run in the first place.

The anecdotal history of sport is nice cheap fun, within anyone's reach. Local channels need to be local and the simultaneous vast improvement in the quality and drop in the costs of AV technology enable today even barefoot historians to learn to make use of methods for presenting sound and moving images, in other words for reporting their studies more intensively than before in the form of image and sound.

Taking the original three-minute film on ski jumping apart and putting it together again into a narrative produced a half-hour "mood document", as we christened the genre. We have since made similar documents about wrestling, ice hockey, Finnish baseball and rally racing - sports with a dense, not necessarily harmonious local tradition going back several decades. With their black-and-white images seasoned with music they belong to the history of mentalities. At least the past is, in them, very much a feeling - not just events.

Local, national and global

The micro-level material that we had unearthed - stories, photos and clippings, small objects from the world of sport - persuaded us to make one more experiment with forms of presentation, to return those mementoes physically to the exact places where these sports are still being practised and watched in Jyväskylä.

Figure 5. Constructing Hippos sports museum in Jyväskylä. (Photo Esa Sironen)

Together with the local sports clubs and their veterans we have tried to develop a new kind of living museum of sports. Our aim is to stimulate and bring forward the experiences and memories of past generations in the form both of grand narratives, global as well as national, of the sports and of the small but all the more important details and anecdotes of the local sporting community.11

Figure 6. "Finnish baseball has deep local roots in Jyväskylä." A corner of a vitrine in Hippos sports museum. (Photo Pekka Kärkkäinen)

On the walls of the large and modern Hippos Hall, for example, we have hung glass cases to illustrate the animal prehistory of sports in general and the area in particular, an old racecourse, and the later phases of the place as the town's first track and field and skiing stadium.

In the Ice Stadium we have returned to the first steps taken by ice hockey in Jyväskylä and climbed up from the old but all the more nostalgic Nisulan Monttu, where hockey was played with great enthusiasm in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Swimming Pool is a place where to exhibit the cultural history of water from Thales, the Bible and the water sprites onwards to the waterside of modernity.

These halls are places where large crowds spend time, waiting for a competition or a game to begin or continue, or children's training period to end. But it is also possible to shorten and deepen this time spent waiting, use it to relive the history of the sport and the place. We have noticed that the glass cases on view there are a kind of iconostasis whose small details and mere presence as such stimulate the viewers to circulate oral tradition further, make different generations to compare their experiences and may provoke the present generation already to ponder what kind of memories of this day and of us will remain in twenty or thirty years' time.

The prevailing tendency in sports is to reduce places to mere space which should be uniform and one-dimensional everywhere, with the same global emblems or posters - Carl Lewis or Jari Litmanen or Teemu Selänne - decorating its walls. We have tried to turn back this development and make the space a place again, a site with its own traditions, identities (in plural) - and name, in our case Hippos. Unlike a space, a place always has a name and the name has a history of its own. A place without history, without time, "is a cave", wrote Edward Relph quite a long time ago, and John Bale has adapted the idea to the various landscapes of sport.12 A placeless place would be without a past, memory and, at the same time, a future as well.

References

1 See Esa Sironen, Reading my landscape, in: Strangers in Sport. Reading Classics of Social Thought. (Ed. by. Soile Veijola, John Bale & E. Sironen), Jyväskylä 1995, pp. 19-32.

2 Martti Silvennoinen, Localities of childhood as a history of mentality and enbodiment. Young, in: Nordic Journal of Youth Research 4 (1996), pp. 18-29.

3 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Ed. by Hannah Arendt, Fontana/Collins 1973, p. 257.

4 See e.g. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. (Ed. by Peter Burke), Pennsylvania 1992, and the nordic collection on narrative sociology in body culture (ed. by Henning Eichberg), in: International Review for the Sociology of Sport 1 (1994).

5 Giovanni Levi, On Microhistory, in: New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ibid. p. 97.

6 Benjamin. ibid., p. 265.

7 See Niels Kayser Nielsen, E.P.Thompson and the Substantial Body in History, in: Strangers in Sport, ibid., pp. 73-84.

8 See the keyword "Sport", in: Finland - a Cultural Encyclopedia (in press).

9 Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge, New York 1983.

10 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire, Paris 1980.

11 Esa Sironen & Pekka Kärkkäinen, Hippos sports museum, LIKES year book 1994-1995. Jyväskylä 1996, pp. 10-13.

12 Edward Relph, Place and Placelesness, London 1976, and John Bale, Landscapes of Modern Sport, Leicester 1994.