Rubber is one of the foundational materials of modern sport. Indeed, it is a foundational material of modern life. Take a moment to consider the things that regularly carry you across any kind of distance: slippers, san- dals, sneakers, shoes, boots, bicycles, motorbikes, wheelchairs, gurneys, cars, buses, planes. So many different kinds of movement rest on rubber.
In the world of sports, there is an endless array of rubber. The wheels of almost any vehicle used in road racing are made of rubber. As are the vast majority of the solid, hollow, and inflated balls made for being hit with feet, heads, hips, hands, rackets, bats, clubs, sticks, and paddles. And of course, there are rubberized surfaces—gymnasium flooring, gymnastic tumbling mats, yoga mats, running tracks. Even some kinds of artificial grass are made with rubber backing and crumb rubber (chopped up tires) that sprays up onto player’s bodies and makes for worse injuries than those that occur on grass (Litman 2014). It would be an exaggeration to say that the world is carpeted in rubber, but it is worth taking seriously the material effort that goes into cushioning impact, and the way this effort has shaped and reshaped landscapes and lives. Rubber has changed the ways we move and the ways we comport ourselves in movement.
When I say that rubber is a foundational material of modern sport and modern life, I use the word modern in part to emphasize the way the concept of sport is tied to the concept of modernity. The English word sport was derived from the French word desport, which meant both enter- tainment and comportment. These two meanings point toward the way
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forms of play and sport shape people as embodied subjects. Sport took on a new meaning of physical competition in the middle of the nineteenth century with the rise of organized sports such as football, rugby, cricket, and athletics (Oxford English Dictionary 2019). In the process, the con- cept became associated on the one hand with set of ideals around athleti- cism, masculinity, and imperialism that were fostered in the British public schools (Mangan 1981; Mangan and McKenzie 2010), and on the other hand it became the name for new professional kinds of competitions:
spectacles that sold seats and merchandise to an emerging middle class equipped with new kinds of leisure (Tenner 2003). Modern sport is a form of institutionalized play and, as such, it contains the shape and form and material conditions of society. More specifically, it is a form of insti- tutionalized play that conditions subject formation and is in turn condi- tioned by bounce: it is vulcanized play.
With the phrase vulcanized play, I aim to capture some key aspects of the relationship between rubber, sport, and technology by tying the his- tory of play, and especially the formation we think of as modern sport, to the industrial and imperial projects that structure the production of truer (better, more reliable, more standard) forms of buffer and bounce pri- marily through the material technology of rubber. Vulcanization is the name given by Thomas Hancock, one of the founders of the British rub- ber industry, to the process of stabilizing, or curing, rubber through the use of high heat, mastication, and additives such as sulfur. The name, which invokes Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and technology, was sug- gested to Hancock by his friend William Brockedon, a painter, inventor, and author of books such as Italy, Classical, Historical, and Picturesque (Hancock 1857). Brockedon’s suggestion reflects a common practice of the time of drawing on Greek and Latin roots to generate names for new technologies. (Think, for example, of the wealth of optical toys devised in Britain at this moment: the thaumatrope [wonder-turner], phenakisto- scope [view- or eye-deceiver], daedaleum [in reference to Daedalus who built wings for his son Icarus], zoopraxiscope [life-by-practice viewer], and zoetrope [wheel of life]). This practice connects British culture to the Greek and Roman empires through the act of naming, often in the pro- cess papering over actual origins. In the case of rubber, the earliest tech- nologies were developed by the Olmec (rubber people) and refined by the
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Mixtec, Aztec, Maya, Tlaxcala, and other pre-Columbian civilizations in what is now named America (Loadman 2005; Tully 2011). Among other uses for the elastic material, these cultures organized spectacular ball games around rubber bounce (Whittington and Mint Museum of Art 2001; Wing 2015). Naming the process developed to cure rubber of its undesirable properties after the Roman god of technology dislocated the technology from its origins in Mesoamerican societies. The phrase vulca- nized play carries forward and displays this trouble with names and asserts deep connections between our forms of play and sport, histories of rub- ber specifically, and histories of technology more broadly. If this volume aims to articulate relationships between sports, society, and technology, this chapter uses the multiple histories of Dunlop to claim material sci- ence, industrial manufacturing, and imperial power as underwriting partners of those three terms and to tell a set of stories about rubber and sport.
While for sport, rubber appears as a foundational material technology, for rubber, sport appears repeatedly at its sites of invention, incorpora- tion, production, expansion, competition, and promotion. What follows are three stories of Dunlop. The first is a story of a person: John Boyd Dunlop Sr., inventor of the pneumatic tire and the co-founder of what would become the Dunlop Rubber Company. This is story about fathers and sons, the sport of cycling and its use as a testing ground for a new technology, the problem of antivibration, the power of names, and the massacres at the sites of rubber extraction at this time. The second is a story of a corporation. The Dunlop Rubber Company, built by the Du Cros family, was one of Britain’s largest multinationals for much of the twentieth century and a top supplier of tires for car and cycling races and equipment for golf, cricket, and racket sports equipment. This is a story about a family of sportsmen and imperialists building a multinational company, transforming rubber into a plantation crop, and promoting what Arthur Du Cros calls “the playing fields of industry” (Du Cros 1938). The third is a story of a brand. Dunlop Sports and the Dunlop Sport brand were originally created under the umbrella of Dunlop Rubber but were sold off after the acquisition of the company by BTR (British Tyre and Rubber) in 1985. By the time Dunlop Pro squash balls began behaving erratically, the brand was owned by Mike Ashley’s com-
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pany Sports Direct. This is a story about a brand name, the problem of true and untrue bounce, and current conditions of global industrial pro- duction. Taken together, these Dunlop stories describe the everyday con- struction of patriarchy and empire. I call these stories following this understanding of storytelling as a form of thinking-with that enables a making-otherwise. In this, I am following Donna Haraway who writes,
“Each time a story helps me remember what I thought I knew, or intro- duces me to new knowledge, a muscle critical for caring about flourishing gets some aerobic exercise” (Haraway 2016, p. 29). These stories are dense and take work to unwind. In exploring the overlaps of how sport has shaped the history of rubber, how rubber has shaped the history of sport, and how together they have shaped the histories of Dunlop, it becomes possible to say: sport runs the histories of Dunlop.