Abstract
Sport may seem like a meritocracy, but scholars debunk, debate, and diagnose the boundaries that keep some on the sidelines, off the air, and out of the game all together.
Keywords
Sports, for me, have been an essentially de-masculinizing experience. As a child soccer prodigy, I scored my first goal by tripping and falling face first into the mud. The ball bounced off my sodden head and into the limp net. During youth basketball games, my coach would yell, “pass it” whenever the ball inadvertently ended up in my awkward hands. And as a fledging referee in high school, I tried my best to exude authority while my faint whistles of control were ignored by my child charges, bounding up the court in wild, playful packs. Oh, and there were cautionary tales about masculinity and aggression: a coach slamming his promising point-guard son into a high school locker after a disappointing game; a friend punching a wall in frustration during a match and breaking his hand. I broke bones too, mostly by falling over or having others fall onto me (all while my more durable sister played rugby).
It will take a lot of strategy and hard work for sport to truly demonstrate the level playing field it has long espoused.
Morgan Paul, Flickr CC
To all this, I preferred the sports page of the newspaper in its neat and considered rows of wins and losses, points and scoring averages. From a distance, sports acquired a certain finesse and delicacy. I grew attentive to tactical nuance and collective artistry—a player might not have scored were it not for the phantom run by a tricky teammate. In other words, it was only at a remove, away from the booing and braying, from the sound and fury, from the sweat and spittle, that sports became a game for me.
Yet even as a spectator seeking mindless diversion, I saw how easily sports absorbed the coarser elements of our society, particularly militarism. Outside a San Diego Chargers game, a fan offended by my dun presence offered to buy me “a ticket back to Afghanistan.” Inside the stadium, bald eagles screeched on Jumbotrons and cops, Marines, and firemen circumambulated an oversized American flag that covered the entire field. But such patriotic pomp is less reflective of football itself—concussive and gladiatorial though it may be—than of the purposes it is made to serve. Left to its own devices, it elicits great depths of feeling in participants and onlookers alike.
Athletics’ magnetism may have to do with the way sports balance countervailing values like individualistic expression and selfless teamwork. With the way it showcases the kinetic and muscular wonders of the human body while also teaching us, cruelly at times, about its limits. Though not unburdened by the depressing depredations of racial, gender, and class divisions, sports are a realm where perseverance, discipline, and merit very often do shine through—sometimes defiantly so.
In this respect, the sporting world has become incredibly more inclusive and diverse in recent years: gay players in the hypermasculine sports of football and basketball have come out, albeit often upon retirement, to a fairly warm reception; there are more Black quarterbacks and Black coaches—thanks, in part, to decaying stereotypes about intellectual and athletic prowess and regulations like the Rooney Rule; and Title IX, a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education, broke the gender line in high school and collegiate sports and has helped swell the ranks of female athletes, boosting confidence, health, and educational achievement along the way. In 1971, the year before Title IX was enacted, for example, there were about 310,000 girls and women in America playing high school and college sports; by 2012, there were more than 3,373,000.
There is yet a long road to travel, however, and many an old-boy network left to unravel. For one, racial injustice underlies the big money college sports of basketball and football, writes Marvin Dawkins, where largely African-American athletes go unpaid and risk injury as the coffers of the NCAA fill to bursting. Similarly, Lucia Trimbur avoids the hysteria of March Madness in considering what might be done to inject some sanity into the disputes over compensation, unionization, and amateurism. As in debates over affirmative action, Kevin Hylton describes how the myth of colorblind “merit” enables a backlash to the push for racial equity in English football management. Cheryl Cooky reflects on the 20th anniversary of the WNBA, the media gap, and the “unevenness of social change” in women’s sports. And lastly, Pat Griffin comments approvingly on the growing number of openly LGBT athletes and coaches and considers the challenges ahead.