Being fanciful, one can imagine fans in the bleachers of the Greek Atalanta’s race. Their cheers would signify their attitude about the Atalanta Syndrome. Some might be yelling for Hippomenes and then happily sending congratulatory wedding messages. Others might be shouting, “Go, Atalanta, go. No, Atalanta, no. Don’t do it. Don’t pick up that apple up.” After the race, they would be drooping like a discarded wedding bouquet. No matter what their side, they would partake of the phenomenon of fandom. The word “fan” is an abbreviation of “fanatic.” In turn, “fanatic” has religious roots, connotating the loss of self in a religious frenzy. The modern fan deeply identifies him or herself with a higher power and is willing to lose the self in the aura of that power – be it a movie star, or a sports star, or a sports team. Yet, the rules of every sport are universal, transparent, and accepted as legitimate.1 They are meant to be stable and strict. Pity poor Alice in the Wonderland in which the rules of a game are whimsical. The paradox of fandom, like that of organized religion, is that one can obtain a sense of boundlessness within a structure.
Because of the competitive nature of sports, the fan hangs in suspense as to whether his/her player or team will prevail. This period is dramatic, full of unknowns and improvisations. Even fixed games pretend to be suspenseful. The suspense creates tension, anxiety, agonies. Fortunately, except for sports that demand silence during play, sports provide an outlet for emotion, a release from normal restraints, a chance to scream and cry out and howl, to clap and cheer and rattle noise-makers, to wear a team’s colors and hats. Boosterism can be boisterous.2) Eventually, every sport, even cricket, finds closure. The game has an end point. Victory will bring ecstasy and too frequently a bullying attitude of superiority; defeat will bring pain and too frequently a churlish and belligerent anger. Defeat also tests the character of the fan, for the true fan must remain loyal even during the bad times.
I am a feminist fan. The feminism I know combines a demand for a critical perspective on the present with a Utopian belief, which realism tempers, in feminism’s promise for the future. When one looks at sports critically, as any sentient person of any age must do, one realizes that modern sports are much more than a plaything. In part because of the reach of the mass and new electronic media, in part because of the growth of leisure time that permits more people to be either players or fans, in part because of effective marketing, sports have grown enormously. They are global source of entertainment, be it for players or tailgaters or couch potatoes tuned in to ESPN 1 or ESPN 2 or the YES channel. The etymology of the word “sport” is the late Latin “deportare,” meaning a diversion, a pastime, fun, applicable to sex (the sporting life) as well as surfing. Feeding the pervasive United States desire and demand for fun, sports are an industry. They have become as well a crucible of personal and national identity, and a matrix of values as powerful as many churches. They pass on to us our authority figures, especially “The Coach;” our celebrities, be they glamour boys and girls or bad boys and girls, who have their own aggressive glamour; our heroes and heroines, our Hercules and Atalanta before that last race; our epic narratives and legends; and some of our values. A resilient “good sport” is to be emulated; a whining “bad sport” shunned.
All this is well-reported and well-known. So are the difficulties of Big Sports. They can be corrupt and corrupting. The violent competitor on the field can be a violent abuser off the field. When sports are a religion, they can crowd out all other values except a god-like victory. The desire to win can lead literally to death for players and fans – to murder, to murderous crowd violence, to destructive “performance enhancing” medications. In the United States, some sports, but only some sports, offer the illusion, but a risky illusion, of possible success and riches to poor and/or minority kids. In our educational institutions, when we are not careful, the student-athlete sacrifices the student for the athlete.
Yet, even though sports are highly public, they are so pervasive and so big that even we may fail to measure them accurately. This unmeasured magnitude exists because sports, both individual and team, are in the middle of a broad spectrum of modern activities in the United States and elsewhere. Since the last part of the 20th century, video and computer games fit into every point on it. These games engross millions, but one of the wonders of sports is their stubborn corporeality, their base resistance to virtualization, their incessant reminder that the mind and body are as linked as veins to arteries. Sports, like parenting, quite literally ground us. With their accompanying video and computer games, this spectrum of activities is so encompassing that we now must deploy the metaphor of the game to picture human behavior. Homo sapiens is a bunch of gamers, gamesters, and game players. This metaphor is as leveling as that of all the world as a stage. Both game and stage picture us as agents within a structure that is partially, but only partially, within our control.
At one end of the spectrum are health, fitness, exercise, self-defense, all endorsed by a common belief in the organic connectivity between the healthy mind and the healthy body and by the feminist conviction that they are “physically and mentally empowering.”3 The New Woman in the 19th and early 20th centuries was proud of her bloomers and bicycle. The New New Woman, the Atalantas, of the 20th and early 21st centuries don their sweats and tote their yoga mats. Significantly, the feminist concern with fitness and exercise has been part of a larger national movement to make them accessible even to those who could not exemplify the norms of the athletic body. 1975 saw the first issues of both Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society and Sports ‘n Spokes, a magazine for wheelchair athletes. In the past few years, the desirability of fitness has become even more prominent because of the diagnosis of an “obesity epidemic,” spawned by a toxic combination of genetics, bad nutrition, and lack of exercise. Not coincidentally in a market economy, selling fitness can add to the bottom line. In 1989, fitness supplies and products brought in $100 million per year to businesses in Canada, $1 billion per year in the United States.4 I have guiltily asked myself how many babies with AIDS or poor women in need of health care my gym membership dues could assist.
In the middle of the spectrum are organized sports. Overlapping with them are some schools of contemporary dance and the praise of some dancers as “athletic.” I think, for example, of Liz Streb and her company, fusing dance with sports and such popular, physically demanding genres as the rodeo and the circus. Instead of being distinct genres, dance and sports train with each other as mutually beneficial kinetic fields.
Moving towards the other end of the spectrum are the games in which the mind may be more active than the body – card games, board games, games of chance. Then, at the other end of the spectrum, is a set of intellectual movements emerging in the mid-20th century. They both study games as systems and study other systems if they were games. Four benchmarks: In 1928, John von Neumann, the great mathematician, began his work on the theory of games, initiating “a mathematical discipline designed to treat rigorously the question of optimal behavior of participants in games of strategy and to determine the resulting equilibria.”5 These games can be noncooperative or cooperative. Game theory has profoundly influenced the social sciences, perhaps most radically economics, military strategy, business, and biology. No mathematician, I read of matrices, zero-sum games, saddle points, information sets, and decision points as if they comprised a foreign language, but one that I realize is the language of the powerful. A second benchmark: in the 1940s, Ludwig Wittengenstein finished Philosophical Investigations, first published in 1953, two years after his death. This now canonical work explores the concept of language-games and the “language-game” itself. Still another benchmark: in 1972, Clifford Geertz, scrutinizing a Balinese cockfight, argues that sports are social texts. A fourth benchmark: in the same year, 1972, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, a collection of essays and dialogues by the polymath Gregory Bateson, appears. Bateson’s bristling, bustling pages argue that the current mathematical game theory of von Neumann will not work for human societies or international relations, suggest that we can apply game theory to understand schizophrenia, and reveal a fascination with playing and gaming. In a dialogue with his daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, she wonders what the two of them are doing. “Daddy,” she asks, “do our talks have rules? The difference between a game and just playing is that a game has rules.”6
Feminism teaches another blunt lesson: gender marks every point on this spectrum. More specifically, gender shapes if it does not control the theory and practice of sports, the spectrum’s mid-point. The feminist analysis, like most modern studies of sport, has proved the existence of the Atalanta Syndrome even more irrevocably than reporters and fans have shown the presence of bias in the judging of figure skating. Let me remind us of the features of the syndrome that haunt most Atalantas, with gratitude to the commentators and scholars who have gone before me but with understandable weariness at the need for reiteration. For the Atalanta Syndrome is as persistent as the Energizer Bunny crossed with a marathoner.
Notwithstanding the presence of pairs in figure skating and couples in mixed doubles, men and women are assigned to different sports in different places. Today, in the United States, men are from football stadiums; women are not. Of course, in some religiously and politically traditional countries, women have been forbidden to occupy public space – be in the law courts or the tennis court. One of the most poignant sections of Leila Ahmed’s autobiography tells of living with a comparatively liberal family in Cairo during the end and the aftermath of English colonialism. Sent to an English school, she was its veritable Atalanta, a champion at track and field events, the winner of cups and trophies. Then, her school entered her a citywide competition where she won the 100-meter dash, setting a new record for Cairo. A picture of her, in her shorts, was in the paper. Her mother, finding it inappropriate, “decreed that I could no longer compete in games – in any public venue, at any rate.”7
If men have access to public space, they create and perform masculinity, whether they are players or fans. As a male fan has written, “Becoming a sports fan is a rite of passage for most men in our society. It gives us a common language, rituals and traditions.”8 Sports are also the theatre in which fathers tutor sons, transfusing the blood of the paternal body into the filial one. The initial resistance to women sportswriters in male locker rooms – anxious, often enraged – is but one sign of the strictness of the gender boundaries in sports.9 In brief, sports help to establish and muscularly reinforce a binary opposition between the genders. They discourage us from imagining what Mary Jo Kane, a leading scholar of sports, has named a “continuum” of athletic activity in which men and women might compete together, grouped according to age or ability or a host of other factors.10
- Michael Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports: Why Americans Watch Baseball, Football, and Basketball and What They See When They Do. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004, p. 23. The book is perceptive, but unfortunately, Mandelbaum focuses on men’s sports and rarely mentions women’s. [↩]
- Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning make this point at far greater length and subtlety in their important Quest for Excitement, Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, pp. 313. Leisure activities, among them sport, provide a contrasting excitement in a life that otherwise demands “control and restraint of overt emotionality . . ..” (p. 66 [↩]
- Toska Olson, “Review,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26: 2 (Winter 2001), 578. Olson is discussing books about women engaging in practices of self-defense and martial arts. [↩]
- Margaret MacNeill, “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Sport and Postmodern Times, ed. Genevieve Rail, in SUNY series on sport, culture, and social relations, ed. Cheryl L. Cole and Michael A Messner. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1998, p. 165. [↩]
- Oskar Morgenstern and Martin Shubik, “Game Theory,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. VI, ed. David L. Sills. New York: Crowell Collier and MacMillan, Inc., 1968, p. 62. I quote this definition because of Morgenstern’s major role in the development of game theory and his co-authorship in 1944 with von Neumann of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. [↩]
- Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind, with a new “Foreword: by Mary Catherine Bateson.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000, p. 17. [↩]
- Leila Ahmed, A Border Passage: From Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey. New York: Penguin, 2000, originally published 1999, p. 151. [↩]
- Jim Buzinski, New York Times, September 8, 2002, L+ SP 13. [↩]
- Jane Leavy, the sportswriter and novelist, has told me in conversation that she found the heavier and more armored the sports uniform, the more hostile the athlete to the presence of women in the locker room. Football players were the most, basketball the least, baseball in between. [↩]
- Mary Jo Kane, “Resistance/Transformation of the Oppositional Binary: Exposing Sports as a Continuum,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues (May, 1995): 191-218. [↩]
