I came across a curious inaccuracy in Eric Dunning’s texts on the origins of the sociology of sport. Dunning repeatedly refers to Heinz Risse, the author of what appears to be the first monograph to feature the phrase ‘sociology of sport’ in the title (Sociologie des Sports, 1921), as a student of Theodor Adorno.
Adorno supervised the work on sport of Heinz Risse whose Soziologie des Sports (1921) was, so far as I know, the first time that this subdiscipline was explicitly named. Adorno also supervised the work of Bero Rigauer which resulted in Sport und Arbeit (Sport and Work) (1969).1
To my knowledge, the sociology of sport first emerged as a specific, named endeavour and the subject of a book-length study in 1921 when Heinz Risse, a student of Theodor Adorno, published his Soziologie des Sports.2
Adorno was five years younger than Risse and had only just entered the university in 1921. Risse’s supervisor in the early 1920s was Alfred Weber.
Dunning’s co-author, Jay Coakley, repeats this error in his pieces on the sociology of sport for The Encyclopedia of Sociology (Vol. 5, p. 2986) and The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology (Vol. 1, p. 368).
Dunning and Coakley co-edited the collection Handbook of Sports Studies (2000). There, Risse is also referred to as Adorno’s student (p. xxii), although the collection features Klaus Heinemann’s piece on the development of the sociology in Germany, which mentions (p. 536) Risse (without biographic details).
Thence, always double-check. Even the classics.