The Politics of Goosebumps: Matt Andrews ’08 Serves History of Sports

Posted on Sept. 24, 2021

Standing in front of a classroom, history professor Matt Andrews ’08 (PhD) has a keen sense of his audience. “When I’m teaching my courses, I remember myself as an 18- and 19-year-old,” said Andrews, who joined the Carolina faculty in 2012. “I was the guy in the back row with his San Francisco Giants baseball cap on, sorta paying attention and sorta not paying attention. And I think to myself, how do I reach that guy? I feel like if I can reach the people in the back row, I can get something going.”

With his Olympian tales of sports glory and social change, Andrews is now reaching well beyond the back row. Not only are his sports-themed history classes some of the most popular on campus, but his American Sport podcast reaches thousands of listeners around the world.

“Historians, we have an advantage in the sense that we tell stories, and people love stories,” Andrews said. “Sports is a great way to tap into that. In every great sports story, there’s narrative, there are characters, there’s built-in tension. And you can tell the history of America through sports.”

In Andrews’ classes and on his podcast, a tale about the long-shot ending of Major League Baseball’s reserve rule becomes a primer on American labor relations. The hype around a heavyweight bout turns into a deep dive on racial anxiety at the turn of the last century. And a look at America’s Olympic competition with the Soviet Union opens a window into the Cold War and its effect on domestic politics. In every one of those lectures, Andrews leans on memorable characters to keep students listening and to create a historical highlight reel that rivals an episode of SportsCenter.

“You don’t have to like sports to take my class,” Andrews explains. “I actually think a lot of students hesitate about taking the class because they think it’ll be all about sports or that it’ll be like sports radio. We’re gonna talk about the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, right? Well, no, we’re not going to be doing that. It’s Jerry Rice, obviously, but we’re not going to be talking about that. We’re going to be asking the big questions in American history, and sports is just how we get there.”

The draw of sports is what first brought Andrews into academia. He grew up in California, attended UCLA — “because it looked like a lot of fun right in the middle of Los Angeles, and it was” — then worked a series of unsatisfying jobs in the Bay Area, including a stint as a research assistant entering reams of data for a literacy project.

---

“You don’t have to like sports to take my class,” Andrews said. “I actually think a lot of students hesitate about taking the class because they think it’ll be all about sports or that it’ll be like sports radio. We’re gonna talk about the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, right? Well, no, we’re not going to be doing that. It’s Jerry Rice, obviously, but we’re not going to be talking about that.”

---

“I’m a perfect example of someone who went to university way too early,” Andrews said. “I went to university because people told me I needed to go to university. I had no idea — almost a negative idea — of what I wanted to do until I was almost 30. That’s when the lightbulb finally went off.”

That moment came after Andrews decided to get his master’s degree at San Francisco State, looking to “do something new, something meaningful” with his life. He took a class with the historian Jules Tygiel, whose best-known book is a 400-page account of Jackie Robinson and the integration of American baseball.

“Up until then, I had no idea that sports history was a thing,” Andrews recalled. “But reading Baseball’s Great Experiment, you see how this is really a book about social movements, about American society.” He was hooked.

Connecting sports to society and politics has gotten much easier during Andrews’ time at Carolina. Before 2016, the year that NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick ignited a firestorm of debate by taking a knee during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racism, Andrews often had to persuade his students that sports and politics are closely linked. “Now they get it,” Andrews said. “They come in already primed to think of sports in that context.”

Andrews remembers watching football games during the 1991 Gulf War and realizing that the military planes roaring over the stadiums before kickoff were the same ones being used in battle overseas. “It sounds obvious, but you don’t really think about that stuff,” he said. “The politics has always been there. It’s just more explicit now.”

Which means plenty of new material to keep his classes lively. Andrews worked his way through a stack of new sports books this summer, including a biography of Serena Williams that he plans to turn into a lesson on celebrity power, motherhood and body image. Timely updates help his classes stay popular, driving much-needed enrollment for the history department. Like many humanities disciplines, history has suffered declining interest among students over the past several years. In fall 2019, there were 256 declared majors in history, down from 528 a decade ago, according to data from UNC’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. Dwindling course signups can threaten departmental funding.

“The vast, vast majority of the students in my classes are not history majors,” Andrews said. “They’re here because the class looks interesting. So one of my jobs is to tell them that history itself is interesting.”

Andrews can focus on that mission because he’s classified as a teaching associate professor, a designation that allows him to spend more time on classroom preparation and less time on the research obligations that define career prospects for most other faculty. “I don’t have to write books, I don’t have to write essays, I don’t have to go to conferences,” Andrews said. “I do some of that stuff, but the emphasis is on teaching.”

He’s always thinking about ways to get his teaching in front of a wider audience. Andrews creates lectures for One Day University, an adult education service that offers in-person events, livestreams and recorded talks from popular college professors nationwide. He’s also a regular highlight for Carolina Public Humanities, a UNC program that attracts daylong seminars for a similar audience of retirees. (The GAA is a longtime program partner of Carolina Public Humanities.)

“I’m never surprised when I talk to 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds and tell them things they don’t know. In some ways, that part of my job is really easy,” Andrews said. “But I’m always kind of surprised even at older audiences who have never really thought about the ways sports and society intersect.”

The next season of the American Sport podcast likely will center on the Olympics — one of Andrews’ favorite topics — and whether the United States should join or boycott the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.

“I’m just fascinated by that question and all the different issues it touches,” Andrews said. “I want to go back to the debate over Moscow in 1980 and talk about the history of Olympic boycotts, really dig into what’s going on in China and all the issues of human rights, corporate pressure and American domestic politics.”

Sports, as Andrews often reminds his students, touches everything. But for all the focus on history and society, Andrews hasn’t lost his fandom.

“I tell my students, I’m not trying to make you hate football or stop enjoying sports,” he said. “I am still a sucker for the thrill of the competition. That Olympic music kicks in, and I get goosebumps.”

— Eric Johnson ’08

---