Studying Sport in the University: Some Problematics and Problems

In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books in November 2014, Lisa Duggan, then president of the American Studies Association (ASA), was asked about the state of the field. When her interviewer suggested that American studies is "a department for boys who wanted to write about baseball," Duggan responded, "Well, we still have that!" She continued,I'm laughing, but that does describe a part of the field. But, if you look through the conference program, you see . . . work in black studies, ethnic studies, histories and politics of sexuality, in addition to more overtly political work on settler colonialism or on US relations with other parts of the world.1Duggan's first response to her interviewer's description-so silly that it provoked laughter-upholds sport studies as juvenile and homosocial. Her observation that "we still have that" intimates that sport studies clings on, despite irrelevance. Contrasting sport studies with many of American studies' most important and thriving areas of inquiry, Duggan implies that black studies, ethnic studies, gender and queer theory, and settler colonialism demand serious intellectual research while sport studies merits a chuckle. Both comments-what sport studies is and what it is not-stem from deeply rooted work/play dichotomies and mental/manual distinctions: How can talk of bodies at play beget rig- orous study? Both comments also assume that sport studies is so hermetically sealed that it cannot include women or be concerned with the notable topics that command the intellectual and political engagement of the rest of American studies.Such characterizations of sport studies may be outdated, but the concomitant dismissal of the subfield is not. Just five months before the interview, the Journal of American History (JAH) published an issue dedicated to the state of sport history and sport studies more generally.2 In the opening essay, Amy Bass laments, "I propose that writing about sports from a historical perspective is entangled in a mess of somewhat unique complications. . . . [the] first problem lies in a general lack of respect for the field of sports history-what one scholar recently described as 'the snubbing of sport history by mainstream historians.'"3 Though the source of this disrespect and the form of these snubs are largely left unspecified, many of the volume's authors concur with Bass's assessment: Excellent scholarship is produced in the subfield, but it remains sidelined. Despite progress, such as the formation of the vibrant Sports Studies Caucus of the ASA, researchers in sport studies struggle for legitimacy.To read Duggan, Bass, and the prominent JAH contributors, it would not be unreasonable to think there is a real crisis of legitimacy in sport studies. And yet, the quality of the literature, the number of books reviewed in prominent generalist journals, the spaces for intellectual collaboration, and the opportunities for debate are inversely proportional to the contention of marginalization. How, then, can we understand these apparently contradictory positions?Historically, academics have been ambivalent about studying popular cultures and "low-brow" social practices and historical processes. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies scandalized literary theorists and historians alike with their careful analyses of lived cultures. Stuart Hall remembers that cultural studies' methods "triggered off a blistering attack from sociology," while the Centre's later focus on sexism and patriarchal domination, race and racism, and militarism only enlarged the choir of disbelievers, who dismissed meticulous research as merely "political." But today's anxiety about sport studies represents more than ambivalence. At a moment when nearly 20 million people tune into the National Football League's (NFL's) opening week,4 when 1,000 college athletes earn upwards of $900 million in profits for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) during March Madness,5 and when college coaches can expect millions of dollars in base salary,6 sport studies has never been more relevant. …