Robert Hayashi is a professor of American Studies at Amherst College, but he comes by his passion for Pittsburgh sports honestly: He grew up in O’Hara Township in the 1970s, fishing, playing soccer and cheering for the legendary Steelers teams of that era.
But Hayashi’s new book “Fields of Play: Sport, Race, and Memory in the Steel City” (University of Pittsburgh Press) is much more than a fan’s notes.
Hayashi uncovers hidden pasts, half-forgotten histories, and new angles on sporting life here, ranging from barnstorming Hawaiian Chinese baseball teams in the 1890s and championship soccer clubs in mid-century Harmarville to the legacy of Black outdoorspeople — and even the racial politics around those Super Steelers.
Hayashi, a Japanese-American, digs into the history of Asians in Western Pennsylvania, which dates back further than many realize — to 1870, when Chinese workers were employed at a cutlery factory in Beaver. The baseball nines from Hawaii came through later — though not late enough that the local press had stopped giving Chinese players nicknames like “the Yellow Peril.”
“I really wanted to frame the larger discussion about the history of sports in Pittsburgh around Asians, because generally, Asians are not really talked about in sports history, and I think that helps promote a certain amount of misunderstandings about Asians and their role in society and really their abilities,” he said in a phone interview. That history, he added, emphasizes “that sports are really defined by exclusion and not inclusion.”
(Hayashi, speaking in December, shared an ironic chuckle over Japanese baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani’s recent record-shattering, $700 million signing with the Los Angeles Dodgers. “It really underscores the fact that Asians are capable of exceeding really even expectations, and creating really sort of new definitions of excellence within the sport,” he said.)
By contrast, the story of working-class soccer teams in the region is occasionally told in the local press. After all, some of those teams and players were competing at the national championship and even Olympic level well within living memory. And the still extant Bridgeville-based Beadling Soccer Club, founded in 1898, claims to be oldest such club in the U.S.
But in “Fields of Play,” Hayashi places soccer’s history in Pittsburgh squarely in the context of the tough, working-class coal towns where it was most popular.
“The coal industry was perhaps one of the most profoundly abusive industrial spaces in the history of the city,” he said. The players, amateurs and often immigrants, typically worked in the mines and factories themselves, and soccer “really was an opportunity to express themselves in these social spaces that were driven really by the coal companies and their really unchecked power, in many ways.”
“To me, these were the sort of original blue-[collar] champions of the Pittsburgh region, and [that] really challenges the notion of soccer that many of us hold today as this sport that's played among the elite in the sort of suburban communities, like where I grew up in the Fox Chapel area,” he added.
Hayashi also explores the world of Black hunters and fishers, which he discovered through the photographs of Charles “Teenie” Harris, that preeminent documenter of mid-20th-century Black life in Pittsburgh.
There were Black sportsmen’s clubs, he writes, and the NRA offered hunters safety classes in the Hill District. The chapter also delves into how conservation laws — meant to address the very real problem of overhunting and overfishing — were typically written to exclude immigrants and other underprivileged people from activities they often practiced not as sport, but to feed themselves.
The chapter “Basketballs, Bunk Beds and Bridges” looks at the social reform movements that catalyzed the widespread building of playgrounds in Pittsburgh starting in the 1920s. Hayashi focuses on Jewish-led institutions like the Irene Kaufmann Settlement House, in the Hill District, and the struggles to desegregate the area’s swimming pools and summer camps.
The chapter “Terrible Towels and Sixty-Minute Men” investigates how race and ethnic identity have played out in Steelers fandom over the decades. Hayashi’s account of Franco’s Italian Army — fans of the late Hall of Fame running back Franco Harris, who had a Black father and Italian mother — is more critical than nostalgic. While noting the good vibes the Army generated, Hayashi posits that the group’s vocal support of Harris worked to obscure his Blackness.
“Pittsburgh Steelers fandom,” he writes, “performs a kind of racial alchemy, whereby the bodies of young men of color become symbols not of their own historical struggles but those of white people, specifically the burdens of the white working class in industrial and now postindustrial America.”
A more recent mixed-race Steeler star provides an even more complicated example. Hines Ward had a Black father and Korean mother. Ward’s Blackness was seen as problematic in Korea, which suffers from its own forms of racism.
While Ward’s success itself helped change some of those attitudes in Korea, Hayashi writes, “The inability of media and fans to fully acknowledge Ward as a mixed-race, Korean-born, Georgia-raised American wide receiver left unexamined the many ways that being Black, Korean, or both comes with costs that few walking around Pittsburgh with a Hines Ward jersey on their back will ever appreciate.”
Whether they’re into soccer or baseball, hunting or swimming or just rooting for the Steelers, Hayashi hopes readers who are Black, Asian, Jewish, immigrants or members of other marginalized groups will see their stories “finally reflected in some of these narratives” and realize as “that they have a legacy. They have a place within this history.”
