When people hear about Greg Bond’s role at Notre Dame, they often assume it’s mainly about football. It’s not.
Bond is the first formal sports archivist in the University of Notre Dame Archives and also curator of the Joyce Sports Research Collection housed in another Hesburgh Library unit, Rare Books & Special Collections.
His duties include maintaining Notre Dame sports-related materials in the archives and overseeing the Joyce collection, a vast assemblage well known among sports scholars. It’s one of the largest sports-history collections in the world and features books, periodicals, photographs and other items.
The University started acquiring non-Notre Dame sports-related materials in the 1960s, long before many people considered athletics a topic for serious research. “Notre Dame got a really good head start on gathering important sports-historical collections: books, ephemera and manuscripts,” says Bond, who joined the University in 2022. Scholars come from all over to delve into the materials.
The collection includes such rare artifacts as former player and sportswriter Sol White’s 1907 History of Colored Base Ball, a fragile volume documenting early Black baseball and its players; “Going to a Fight,” an 1819 hand-painted British scroll, about 13 feet long, which depicts people heading to watch a boxing match on a town green; and a 1950 Jackie Robinson doll in a Dodgers uniform.
One of the oldest books in the collection was printed in 1573. It’s a second edition of Hieronymi Mercurialis De arte gymnastica libri sex (Six Books on the Art of Gymnastics by Girolamo Mercuriale), a volume that explores classical ideas about exercise and health. The earliest boxing book in the collection, published in England, is from the 1700s. One early American publication is a copy of Sermons to gentlemen upon temperance and exercise, a 1772 medical and self-help book by Dr. Benjamin Rush, a future Founding Father.
It also includes a nearly comprehensive run of mail-order catalogues published by the Spalding sporting goods company from 1892 to 1941, as well as the Jack Pfefer Wrestling Collection, a large assortment of correspondence, posters, programs and financial records documenting professional wrestling’s evolution from a true sport into the scripted spectacle of recent decades.
The 1970s purchase of the inventory of a Los Angeles sports-publications dealer forms the core of the Joyce collection, which was endowed in 1987 and named in honor of Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, CSC, ’37, a longtime University executive vice president.
A history major at Bowdoin College, Bond earned a master’s degree in library science and a doctoral degree in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During graduate school, he specialized in research on African American athletes of the late-19th century, mainly in baseball, boxing, horse racing and bicycling. The convergence of race and sports is a lifelong interest.
Bond started that research after reading a biography of baseball catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker of the Toledo Blue Stockings, who in 1884 became one of the first Black men known to play in what was then the major leagues. “Then I realized there were other African Americans who played in integrated minor leagues in the 1880s,” Bond says.
Many Black athletes succeeded at the highest levels of sport in the late 19th century. Disapproving white players, fans, owners and journalists pushed back against integrated competition and forced Black athletes out, he explains.
As the library’s sports studies specialist, Bond teaches students and visitors how to access the materials and creates educational exhibits. Two years ago, he co-curated “Notre Dame Football Kills Prejudice: Citizenship and Faith in 1924,” which placed the rise of Fighting Irish football during the Knute Rockne era in the context of rampant anti-Catholicism, the rising strength of the Ku Klux Klan and public debate about American identity.
Back then, “people on and off campus understood Notre Dame football as something bigger because of the cultural moment in which it was happening,” Bond says. “Some people today will say, ‘[NBA star] LeBron James, shut up and dribble.’ But you can’t separate sports from politics. Sports is always political. You can’t separate sports from the underlying cultural, social and political environment it rises up from.”
Bond curated an exhibit about football at historically Black colleges and universities that coincided with Notre Dame’s 2023 game against Tennessee State. He also has worked on projects about women’s sports and the Gay Games, founded as the Gay Olympics in California in 1982.
“LGBTQ athletes often had a tough time feeling welcome,” he says. “We don’t study history to criticize people, to condemn people or to judge them based on our current points of view. We try to understand what happened and why it happened, and then let people draw their own interpretations from the history we present based on being true to the sources we have in our collection.”
He arranges loans of artifacts such as Rockne’s coaching whistle and a 1931 Rockne game board, which he sent to The History Museum in South Bend for a recent exhibit.
For the September 6, 2026, Shamrock Series game against the Wisconsin Badgers in Green Bay, Bond is working with the University of Wisconsin and the Green Bay Packers on a pop-up exhibit that will focus on the Notre Dame-Wisconsin series. It will appear at the Packers’ Hall of Fame at Lambeau Field. Curly Lambeau, a Wisconsin football legend and co-founder of the Green Bay Packers, attended Notre Dame in 1918, scoring the first touchdown under Rockne, Class of 1914, then the new head coach.
“I knew the broad outlines of Notre Dame football when I started this job. I’ve gotten a crash course in the past four years, and I’m still learning,” Bond says.
Rockne-era athletics department records are among the most significant holdings in the archives. The papers offer a rare, comprehensive look at early big-time college football, including the coach’s correspondence with figures such as baseball great Babe Ruth and records documenting how football revenue financed the construction of Notre Dame Stadium. Author Murray Sperber pored over those records to write the 1993 book, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football.
Many colleges didn’t take their athletics departments seriously enough to retain such records. After Rockne died in a plane crash in 1931, his office was cleaned out, but the papers were stored and maintained. “There are very few collections that tell the story of college sports in the [1910s] and ’20s in the way the Rockne-era athletic department records do,” Bond says.
Such records are carefully kept today. “Nowadays, sports studies is much more well established. Lots of people study sports history, sports sociology, sports communications and other related subjects,” he says.
Bond continues researching the segregation era. He’s working on one article about William Clarence Matthews, an African American and star shortstop on the Harvard baseball team from 1902 to 1905, and another about a 1939 track meet involving Wisconsin, Missouri and Notre Dame that was canceled when Missouri refused to host Black hurdler Ed Smith of Wisconsin. Notre Dame administrators sided with Wisconsin in agreeing to cancel the meet.
During the Jim Crow era, many northern colleges were pressured to bench their Black players during games in the South. That history includes Notre Dame’s own integration story, Bond says. A 1953 Notre Dame vs. Georgia Tech game was moved from Atlanta to South Bend so Black players Wayne Edmonds ’56 and Dick Washington of the Irish could participate.
Bond is grateful for the opportunity to focus on his area of scholarly expertise. “Most archivists don’t get to specialize,” he explains. “It’s relatively rare and there are very few academic libraries that specialize in sport the way that the Joyce Sports Research Collection and the archives do. I’m very lucky to be here and to manage this world-class collection.”
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.