A fan of history and sports, the archivist found a rare job that blends those interests.
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.
Originally published by at weareall.nd.edu on July 28, 2026.