Gerald Gill, a longtime Tufts history professor who passed away this summer, was a lifelong New York Yankees fan.
It was an improbable choice for a black youth growing up in New York in a time when the city's two other franchises - the Brooklyn Dodgers, who signed Jackie Robinson in 1946, and the New York Giants, who had one of the first black crossover stars in Willie Mays - were leaders in the integration of baseball.
The Yankees, meanwhile, were the second-to-last team to sign a black player and claims of pervasive racism among their front office dogged the organization for years.
While his devotion may have been a liability among Tufts' Red Sox faithful - "It got him into a lot of trouble around here," University Professor Sol Gittleman said - it revealed two sides of Gill: a through-and-through historian and a diehard sports fan.
"For a black guy his age to be rooting for the Yankees was inconceivable to me," said Steven Cohen, a lecturer in American Studies. "I used to give him a hard time about it, but he always explained it in context.
"It was baseball, but to him, it was history," Cohen continued.
Thanks to Gill, who passed away on July 27, Tufts students now have the chance to study baseball - and more broadly, professional sports - in the historical context in which he always placed them. Gill leaves behind a curriculum that lifted the study of sports from the realm of fandom to the ranks of social and historical importance.
"He was the first historian at Tufts that really made the study of sports into a discipline," said Gittleman, who, together with Gill, formed the core of Tufts' sports-based curriculum. "It wasn't just black players in the Negro Leagues, either ... the Irish prize-fighter, the Jewish basketball player - that was his stuff. There would be no sports curriculum at Tufts without him."
That curriculum now includes at least four classes across the School of Arts and Sciences and the Experimental College. Gill taught a course on the history of professional sports in America, and Gittleman teaches a history seminar called "America and the National Pastime" and a freshman seminar entitled, "Writing About Baseball." The Experimental College offers "The Analysis of Baseball: Statistics and Sabermetrics," believed to be the nation's only college-level course on the statistical analysis of baseball, and "The Business of Sports," an economics course on the NBA.
Although Gill taught only one course about sports and was primarily considered the department's expert on civil rights and the American South, Gittleman describes him as the driving force in establishing sports as an academic subject worthy of study.
"He put all of that - pennant races and prizefighters and Jackie Robinson - in an academic perspective, and he was very, very scholarly about it," Gittleman said. "He created the matrix of sports as an academic discipline."
As a new arrival to the history department in 1980, Gill was appointed as a specialist in the American South and African-American history. But he planted the idea of teaching a class about sports, scratching an intellectual itch and combining hobby with scholarship. His "Sports in America" course debuted in the fall of 2001 and was consistently filled to capacity.
"He was an avid sports fan, and he was incredibly good at putting that stuff in an academic context," said David Pomerantz (LA'07), an advisee of Gill's. "The Negro Leagues, Muhammad Ali, Jack Johnson - that was history to him."
The course was fodder for Tufts sports' junkies. But Gill wanted his students to be more than box-score checkers, and he drew out the parallels between sports, especially baseball, and trends in American history.
Genuine history buffs - and those sports fans whom Gill was able to convert - were treated to a course that meshed fan and scholar not as mutually exclusive, but as complementary roles.
"For the people who appreciated the historical connection, it was a great course," said Andrew Silver (LA '07), who took Gill's class in the spring of 2006. "Not only did you have an extremely interesting topic with obvious connections to the broader topic of American history, but you also had a professor who clearly felt that connection himself."
For Gill, sports reflected the major changes in 19th- and 20th-century American society: immigration, urbanization, economic changes and integration. Gill approached the subject the same way he approached his class on race relations and the American South: above all, as a history course.
"Bringing in actual Negro League jerseys and hats was the equivalent of bringing in a soldier's uniform for a course on World War I," Silver said. "Things like that strengthened the students' connection to the course."
When Gill arrived, sports were not a part of the history department's course offerings. Now, Tufts is one of many major colleges and universities that offer full-credit courses about sports, and it does so in a range of departments as diverse as history, sociology, economics, mathematics and law.
"[Gill] played a huge role with students, but it went beyond that: He had a major impact on his colleagues that is still continuing," said Gittleman, who published a book about the 1950s New York Yankees in April and credits Gill as a major influence on his research.
"He was a teacher of teachers; that may be his greatest legacy."
