‘History as a plenum of documents t

‘History as a plenum of documents that attest to the occurrence of events’,
writes White, ‘can be put together in a number of different and equally plausible narrative accounts’.

Moreover, these choices carry distinct ideological and political implications:
historians and their readers may reach quite ‘different conclusions’ from these narratives ‘about “what must be done” in the present’.

Sport historians have overwhelmingly ignored White’s work, although Murray Phillips recently employed White’s model to compare two sets of historical narratives about the Australian surf lifesaving movement.

I examine Phillips’ work more closely in Chapter 4.

Phillips’ analysis is profound; he clearly demonstrates the need for sport historians to familiarise themselves better with deconstructionism. This is all the more important as linguistic elements of deconstructionism diffuse from other quarters, notably cultural studies, into sport history.

I take up some of these elements in Chapter 11.