Editor’s note: Pacific NW magazine’s weekly Backstory provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the writer’s process or an extra tidbit that accompanies our cover story. This week’s cover story is an edited excerpt from Shaun Scott’s book “Heartbreak City: Seattle Sports and the Unmet Promise of Urban Progress.”
FOR AMERICAN CITIES, sports have never been just sports. Athletics are great vaults of fiscal and psychological investment, symbols of socioeconomic competition between groups that have more power and those that have less. Sports are an abstraction of the relationship that city dwellers have with other city dwellers, that cities have with other cities, and that urbanites have with their built and natural environments. How people do anything is how they do everything; the games people play say a lot about who they are.
Seattle’s place on the far left coast of the United States puts it in the center of stories about hard work and self-reliance that Americans have been telling themselves since the age of westward expansion. In the same way that colonial Seattleites believed they could fashion a great city from thin air and willpower, many American city dwellers — even the urban poor — believe themselves momentarily defeated aristocrats who one day will become wealthy with just a little more effort.
Just as sports fandom is subject to euphoric highs and devastating lows, politics in American cities sway from periods of progress to eras of retrenchment. The climax of collective action is often followed by a conservative crash. Progressives in America’s cities experience their politics as they experience their sports: through a few ups and many downs, on the edge of failure and at risk of heartbreak.
My book, “Heartbreak City,” tracks this contest between progressivism and conservatism in American cities through the medium of athletics in the late-19th, 20th and 21st centuries. I argue that historical iterations of the progressive movement succeeded inasmuch as they made the absolute most of opportunities for political transformation, and failed to the extent that reactionaries countermobilized to undo progressive gains.
Through the prism of Seattle and its sundry rivalries with other American cities, I show how progressive urbanites use athletics to solve persistent problems in American life: racism, gender inequity and repression of sexual minorities, ableism, wealth inequality and ruination of the environment. Concurrently, opponents of social progress have used sport to consolidate their power. Cities are open-air arenas where the forward winds of progress and gusts of regressivity swirl.
Nearly every American sport appears in my book because every sport is politically significant. Basketball is the sport of forward-thinking urbanism, a game of grace and fluidity where divides of race and gender are confronted and reconciled: The Sonics modeled Black Seattle’s fight for socioeconomic inclusion, while the Storm galvanized underrepresented women and LGBTQ+ fans. Conversely, hockey and football are rugged recreations that resurrect the survival-of-the-fittest frontier heritage that Seattle never truly left behind.
The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times.

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