Byrne, Julie. New York:  Columbia University Press, 2003. 320 pages, $22.50 (USD). ISBN: 0-231-12749-9 (PB).

[1] Julie Byrne’s story of Immaculata, a small Catholic women’s college near Philadelphia, and their champion national basketball team, the Mighty Macs, reads with the intensity of watching a player score a three-point shot to win the game in overtime, or even more like an exciting game with expected strategies but also unexpected twists, turns, and surprises.  The basketball players’ narratives that Byrne includes (gathered from live interviews, written surveys, and historical archives) generally affirm Catholic social, physical, and spiritual stereotypes.  Nevertheless, the very peculiarity of an underdog all-female Catholic college contributing to women’s sports on a national level fashions a nuanced story that reveals challenges and resistances to broader traditional Catholic expectations for women.

[2] Byrne sets her study of a nonreligious activity within the larger framework of lived religion, where the everyday religious lives of individuals shed light on a larger faith culture in which human agents creatively work within ideological contradictions and institutional control.  Her work aptly applies to scholars of American religious history, Catholicism, sports history, as well as those interested in gender studies.  In the scope of religion and popular culture, Byrne is not concerned with whether the rituals of basketball and spectatorship are religious in themselves.  Basketball is not a religion for these young players and their fans; however, their basketball team happens to be funded, supported, staffed, and made up of a tight-knit Philadelphia Catholic community with a long tradition of extracurricular sports in which the Might Mac game affected the religious culture and visa versa.   Byrne explores how Immaculata basketball players “became subjects for whom sports could provide a resource and strategy within Catholicism” in the “relationship between the institution and the individual” (13).

[3] Immaculata began its first varsity competition in 1939, and Byrne traces its basketball tradition from the beginnings through its victories in the first three women’s national college basketball championships (1972-1974).  She thematically organizes the chapters according to a typical basketball season ranging from tryouts to the final game.  Chapter 1 explores how Immaculta players created identities as they made the team.  Basketball dictated their time, who they respected, and their feminine athletic and religious identities.  Byrne posits that the team was a microcosm of the Catholic community and therefore the molding of identities was not without conflict. 

[4] Next Byrne tells of how the Immaculta community reworked class status in relation to basketball.  Byrne demonstrates how the tensions between the working lower-class students of Immaculta differed from their wealthy sister schools; how South American and African American students influenced the campus environment; how boarding students’ experiences were vastly different from those of commuter students; and how players reacted to the class distinctions that they encountered on road trips.  Byrne reveals that the basketball court had a type of leveling consequence for these tensions while also melding gender differences.

[5] Byrne argues that Immaculta players remembered the pleasure of their moving, sweating bodies.  The players challenged traditional notions of femininity while still insisting on their moral status as “ladies.”    Byrne’s discussion of the slow change in cumbersome female uniforms, and the unhurried modifications in women’s basketball game regulation, highlights gender expectations to which Immaculta players conformed and resisted. 

[6] The women identified as players but also as serious college students, but the most recognized aspect of their identity was their Catholicism.  Byrne’s interviewees speak of how basketball was, for them, religiously infused and had spiritual meaning, whether that be from attributing their winning seasons to the prayers of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, to equating a loss with a religious holiday such as Ash Wednesday, to attending Mass on game day, or to praying before every tip-off.  Basketball offered these women new ways to explore their faith.

[7] At the same time, their Catholicism distanced the Mighty Macs from other teams they met on the road whose morals, cultures, race, and economic status differed from their own.  The contrast between Catholics and non-Catholics was made more evident by the influence of Vatican II (or lack thereof) on the Immaculta community.  Thus Byrne contextualizes her work within the larger cultural changes in the Catholic Church, in women’s roles, and in turbulent American life.  Immaculata players never identify as feminists, but they do enjoy their status as “authority figures and role models in circles that supported them” (204).  They benefit from the pleasures of basketball and experience no contradiction between womanhood, athletics, and religion.  By retelling their success story through a refreshing lens, Byrne demonstrates that the “Cinderella” Immaculta team did much to liberate national attitudes far beyond that which they recognized.

[8] Byrne leaves readers with more questions than answers, but she has greatly contributed to the much-needed work on religious practice, grounded in the belief that experience is both nestled within institutional religion and separate from it.  Readers are reminded once again of the oft-concluded notion in contemporary studies of women and religion which suggests that women pragmatically act within the boundaries of their religious institutions.  The Mighty Macs are no different as they negotiate contradictory ideologies and resist traditional gender expectations and roles.  Yet, Byrne supplies a discourse of pleasure to add an unexplored theoretical dimension to studies of historical subjects and the familiar narrative of negotiation. Further studies and theoretical wrestling with concepts of desire, emotion, and pursuit can only contribute to the study of lived religion.  For this round, Byrne has scored with an amazing story, compelling subjects, and a valuable contribution to the study of American religion.

Howell Williams
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida
HowellWilliams@yahoo.com