ABSTRACT
During the 1920s sport stood at the centre of American national self-definition. Both contemporary and later chroniclers of the era labelled it the ‘golden age' of American sport. [1] ournalist Frederick Lewis Allen's popular interpretation of the decade, Only Yesterday, contended that sport had become the nation's most fervent ‘obsession'. Sporting contests captured popular attention as never before. Attending contests, reading about athletic endeavours in the print press, listening to games on the radio and watching competitions in the newsreels created a common popular culture centred around sports. This ardent consumption of sports, according to Allen, marked one of the new sets of behaviours that bound modern Americans tightly together into a homogenous mass culture. [2]
