‘The helping,the fixtures,the kits,the gear,the gum shields,the food,the snacks,the waiting,the rain,the car rides … ’: social class,parenting and children's organised activities

ABSTRACT

Class-related parenting cultures and ideologies have been of considerable interest to academics over the last two decades. Much of the research thus far has focused on exploring Annette Lareau's conceptualisations of ‘natural growth’ and ‘concerted cultivation’ and the implications for outcomes in relation to education. The focus of the present article is organised activities, which are a central but as yet relatively under-researched feature of middle-class parenting. The findings are based upon 73 semi-structured interviews with parents and children from 48 middle-class families living in and around a small city in northern England. The article reveals that initiating and facilitating children's organised activities is considered a central aspect of ‘good’ parenting in middle-class social networks. It is shown how this is a consequence of several developments within society over the past three decades or so, including the rising levels of maternal employment, the growing competitiveness of the labour market and the increasing concerns related to children's health and safety. It is argued that these developments have heightened middle-class parents’ predisposition to not only be involved with and invest in their children's leisure biographies, but to do so in a more deliberate, rigorous and rational manner.     

Soccer and integrating Europe’s Muslim minorities: the good,and bad and the ugly

Drawing from recent debates about Muslim immigrants’ lack of integration into European societies, the current article advances a main argument regarding the nexus between soccer and Muslim immigrants’ integration within their host European societies by reviewing dominant theoretical models and focusing on elite European male Muslim soccer players. Considering the growing recent debate about the role of Muslim immigrants in their European societies, soccer has the potential to assist European countries to increase Muslims’ integration level. Elite Muslim soccer players are among the most influential immigrants in European societies. Muslim soccer players could contribute to increase understanding and community unity between different social groups within European societies as many of them prove that identity hyphenation and combining ethnicity and European nationality is possible for Muslim immigrants. Soccer could give more confidence to the generation of young Muslims about being accepted by European majorities.     

Ancient Greek ‘Amateurism’, the NCAA and the Courts

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has recently been the target of many lawsuits challenging its definition and regulation of amateurism, which it holds as providing unique moral and social benefits for both its scholar-athletes and society at large. This conception of amateurism is inherited from nineteenth-century models of ancient Greek athletics via figures such as John Mahaffy and E.N. Gardiner. This influence is evident in legal cases involving the NCAA or athletics in general, and hence amateurism is cited by judges and others as a long-standing Western cultural tradition which encourages moral and social development. This is problematic, however, as not only is it historically questionable, but also the citation of cultural heritage in legal dicta has seen legal criticism or reversal.     

Olympic medals and demo-economic factors: Novel predictors,the ex-host effect,the exact role of team size,and the “population-GDP” model revisited

The present study revisited the problem of estimating Olympic success by critical demo-economic indicators. The sample consisted of the 75 winner countries at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games (not previously analyzed). Medal totals were log-linearly regressed on land, population, GDP, urban population, inflation, growth rate, unemployment, labor force, health expenditures, ex-host, and team size. Multiple regression assumptions were tested with proper diagnostics including collinearity. Olympic team size was the best single predictors of Olympic medals (R² = 0.690, p < 0.001), and as an alternative criterion variable was significantly regressed on population, growth rate, health expenditure, and unemployment (R² = 0.563, p < 0.001). Medal totals were significantly regressed on population, ex-host, health expenditure, growth rate, and unemployment (R² = 0.541, p < 0.001). The classical population-GDP model extracted only 28% of the variance in total medals (R² = 0.277, p < 0.001), and this was slightly improved when combined with unemployment (R² = 0.365, p < 0.001). It appears that the size of the Olympic team plays the role of transmitting the composite impact of a country's size and economy to the end-phase of Olympic success. Winning Olympic medals depends on the combined potential of population, wealth, growth rate, unemployment, ex-host, and social-sport expenditures. Larger and wealthier countries win more medals by “producing” larger Olympic teams as a result of possessing more athletic talents and better support for social and sport related activities.     

Turning the Country into an “Immense and Clamorous Stadium”: Perón,the New Argentina,and the 1951 Pan-American Games

Abstract

During the Peronist regime (1946–1955), the Argentine government encouraged and financed a wide variety of sports activities. This investment bore fruit internationally and Juan Perón tried to make political capital out of the achievements of Argentine individual athletes or national teams in international competitions. Such achievements were presented as a collective victory of Argentine society, transcending the divisions of social class, ethnic origins, place of residence, or political affiliation. Argentine participation in the London Olympics in 1948, the hosting of the world basketball championship in Buenos Aires in 1950, and above all the organization of the first Pan-American games in the Argentine in March 1951, all, served to promote patriotism and national unity at home and improve the country’s image in the international scene. This paper focuses on an analysis of a 250-page book published by the sports magazine Mundo Deportivo, sponsored by the Peronist government, on the eve of the games. Both the text and the images attest to its populist character, its quest for modernity, emphasis on social mobility, and an authoritarian way of imposing national unity. The initiative to hold such games in Argentina dated back to 1940 but it had to be postponed twice: first to 1948 because of the Second World War, and then to 1951 because of the London Olympic Games. Perón’s government wanted these games to serve as a proof of the regime’s success. To that end, the president urged the organizers to ‘spur no effort’, promising them any financial assistance they might need. A year and a half before the inaugural ceremony, held at the Racing stadium (officially named the President Perón Stadium), the organizational effort moved into high gear, and Perón supervized it personally. Argentina was indeed the big winner in this event, its athletes capturing a total of 153 medals.     

George Walker and the ghost: the chess-player in urban and literary culture, 1840–51

This article aims to contextualise the nineteenth-century chess-player and writer George Walker’s involvement within urban and literary culture. Continuing research published in two recent Sport in History articles concerning Walker’s essays on the chess-player in Victorian Paris, this article considers another side to the chess-player’s cultural image in a different urban setting within Walker’s historical-fiction ‘A Night in York – A Chess Adventure of 1842’, in which the author imagines a night-time meeting with a ghostly medieval chess-player. George Walker’s life was marked by an involvement within the sites of nineteenth-century literary and urban chess-play. One notable feature of Walker’s writing was his constant return to the history of the game and its influence on the present day. Indeed, the interplay between chess past and chess present has been seen as a problematic aspect of his literary output. This article considers this theme and contends that Walker’s regard for the past should be seen within the context of modernity and an attempt to recover and pay sufficient attention to the historic game before its traces and fragments disappeared forever, while acknowledging the futility of the effort.     

Cultural Imperialism,Nationalism, and the Modernization of Physical Education and Sport in China, 1840–1949

Abstract

This paper examines how missionary educational institutions and Young Men’s Christian Association physical education and sport programmes, in conjunction with the nation-building project of the Nationalist government, transformed and modernized physical education and sport in China from 1840 to 1937. The concepts of cultural imperialism and nationalism are central to this study, to understand how the two interacted in the process of the development of modern physical education and sports in China. This paper argues that the cultural imperialism model is ineffective for an understanding of the impact of missionaries on Chinese society and the subsequent transformation and indigenization of physical education and sport in modern China. More precisely, the way in which Chinese nationalism played an active role in resisting, selecting, and reshaping the cultural products (modern physical education and sport) evidences a process that was an active negotiation, rather than a passive consumption, of Western culture. This said, Christian physical education and sport programmes had long-lasting effects on how physical education and sports became the way to define ‘modern’ bodies as they were incorporated into the wider education programme of modernizing China under the Nationalist government.     

For the Good of the Game? The Legacy of the Football Trust,the Football Pools,and the Dangerous Seduction of Political Promise

During the late twentieth century, the United Kingdom’s football infrastructure and spectatorship underwent transformation as successive stadia disasters heightened political and public scrutiny of the game and prompted industry change. Central to this process was the government’s formation of an independent charitable organization to oversee subsequent policy implementation and grant-aid provision to clubs for safety, crowd, and spectator requirements. This entity, which began in 1975 focusing on ground improvement, developed into the Football Trust. The Trust was funded directly by the football pools companies who ran popular low-stakes football betting enterprises. Working in association with the Pools Promoters Association (PPA), and demonstrating their social responsibility towards the game’s constituents, the pools resourced a wide array of Trust activities. Yet irrespective of government mandate, the PPA and Trust were continually confronted by political and economic obstacles that threatened the effectiveness of their arrangements. In this paper the history of the Football Trust is investigated, along with its partnership with the PPA, and its relationship with the government within the context of broader political shifts, stadia catastrophes, official inquiries, and commercial threats. It is contended that while the Trust/PPA partnership had a respectable legacy, their history afforded little protection against adverse contemporary conditions.     

Chinese Desires? Olympism and Dominance,Guangzhou and Missed Opportunity,Major Leagues and Isolation on the Pacific Rim

Understanding the situation of China's self-promotion via Olympism requires us to connect two patterns. China is successful at Guangzhou and in Beijing Games at sponsoring and competing in Olympic-style sports festivals, but also surrounded by highly popular professional team sport leagues in baseball, rugby and cricket from Japan to India. China is successful in the promotion of its new capitalist economy but is critically short of energy sources and its aggressive diplomacy in pursuit of energy by land and sea has led to confrontations from Japan to Burma and even to the US ‘pivot’ to Asia. Review of theories of situation demonstrates that while a Debord-style spectacle theory might seem to explain the sporting spectacles and a realism in the tradition of Clausewitz might seem suited to the military situation, in fact approaches to situation combining realist and constructivist elements are stronger; a Deleuzian emphasis on will to power needs to be supplemented by Weberian attention to ends and ideas. Neither pattern explains the other; they connect. China makes history and its internal debates over state and middle class values can be tracked observing promotion of professional team sport in urban China and the scale of state sponsorship of Olympic-style games.     

Sport,politics and the labour movement: the British workers' sports federation, 1923–1935

Reading articles about the Tarahumara Indians of Northern Mexico that have appeared in popular US magazines, I identify four interlocking themes that constitute the Tarahumaras as a ‘white man's Indian’: a) the Tarahumaras are primitive hunters; b) they eat a simple and healthy diet; c) they complete superhuman feats of endurance; and d) they lack the sense of time/work discipline that would make them successful athletes in Western-style endurance events. These themes constitute the Tarahumaras as noble savages whose supposedly primitive lifestyle offers US runners a solution for the diseases of overcivilization. They also serve the needs of a burgeoning sport/tourism industry that sells stereotypical images of ‘Indians’ to US runners and tourists.     

Rhodesia and the Olympic Games: representations of masculinity,war and Empire, 1965–1980

White-settler-ruled Rhodesia faced isolation from international sporting competition after its unilateral declaration of independence in 1965, including from the Olympic Games. Sport reflected the qualities of white Rhodesian society, including its gendered and racialized norms. Rhodesia inherited its sporting ethic from Great Britain, and the British influence on Rhodesian sport remained indelible even as anti-British sentiment flared in the white community as Britain worked to exclude Rhodesia from international sport. This work highlights the irony that Rhodesia adhered to Imperial British social norms on the playing field while trying to assert an independent and anti-British national identity.     

‘We Will Try Again,Again, Again to Make It Bigger’: Japan,American Football,and the Super Bowl in the Past,Present, and Future

Abstract

This study is to analyse how the Japanese have traditionally received and currently perceive the Super Bowl, and for this purpose, it aims to locate the position of American football in Japanese history, society, and culture. It explores the game’s history and then examine the degree of its spread among Japan’s sporting population. A two-dimensional approach of historical study and inter-game comparison gives context to the analyses of reference frequency and contents of news media, followed by speculative discussions of what the near future of Japan’s American football would be like. To conclude, it clarifies the ways the Super Bowl has been received and is now being perceived by two groups: The first group is the general people who see the Super Bowl as the convenient and useful medium by which they could learn effectively about American culture through the one-night mania for ‘conspicuous consumption’. The second group comprises American football experts and enthusiasts, including 13,000 athletes and their OBs, coaches, trainers, and other staff members of the leagues and associations as well as the general sports fans. For this group, the Super Bowl is the apex of their favourite sport to which only a selected talented few could join.     

Pelé, racial discourse and the 1958 World Cup

The aim of this essay is to map out the racial discourses of the 1950s, particularly those pertinent to the 1958 Soccer World Cup, in order to better understand the main ideas about race, which were in vogue at the time when Edson Arantes do Nascimento (Pelé) became (inter)nationally famous as a great sports star. The essay argues that Pelé’s statements regarding race and race relations in Brazil were inherently based on the discourses prevalent among academics and Brazil’s black activists during the 1950s. Pelé’s professional asceticism and his belief in individualism, cultivated during his youth in the city of Bauru, were further reinforced by the racial discourses of the 1950s. These views led him to believe that any discrimination he might encounter due to his colour and class could be overcome with a disciplined and professional attitude. Today, this sort of ascetic view of the world has been accused by certain segments of Brazil’s black movements as being insufficient to overcome the supposedly irresolvable inequalities that exist between Brazil’s black and white populations. Pelé, however, has not changed his position regarding anti-black discrimination, choosing to continue to emphasize professionalism and discipline as the two most formidable tools in the fight against racial discrimination and inequality.     

White is the new black? Football,media and the New Zealand imagination

This paper interrogates the media articulation of football/soccer to New Zealand national consciousness during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. 541 articles from national and regional newspapers and Internet news sites were gathered and analysed using a critically discursive approach. I argue that the press re-framed football within the national sporting imagination in the context of a narcissistic nationalism. Coverage was underpinned by several interlocking themes. First, falsely positing football as ethnically inclusive by emphasizing Māori players’ presence in the national team. Second, the entrenchment of archetypes and caricatures of both others and the national self. This included the evocation of a mythic New Zealand masculinity, with specific individuals lionized as key embodiments of the fictive national character. Third, the caricaturing of other nationalities is also used to bolster the national self – in particular the Italians and Australians. Such framings resonate with long-standing themes in the selective construction of a settler-informed New Zealand nationalism. Coverage, however, ignores the complexity of how individuals are flexibly and ambiguously articulated to the nation, particularly in the context of the global football labour market.