https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=8408&context=etd

Remapping and visualizing baseball labor: a digital humanities project

This paper explores the marginalized practice of sportswriting to demonstrate the limited ways in which the question “who is a journalist?” has been answered within the profession. Following John Dewey and Raymond Williams, we offer an alternative view of democratic culture that values narrative as well as information. We also discuss how “New Journalists” (and other writers since), in their quest for fresh, sophisticated storytelling strategies, turned to sports as a cultural activity worthy of serious examination. Our goal is to demonstrate that sportswriting fundamentally resembles other forms of reporting and that journalism should not use sports as an ethical straw man against which to defend the virtue of its serious work. This suspension of our usual ethical judgments would deepen our sense of the moral significance of sportswriting and allow us to rethink journalism's relation to democratic culture in productive new ways.

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Sports Journalism as Moral and Ethical Discourse

In recent years, the place of Polynesians in American football has received considerable attention as the news media complex has featured stories on Hawaiians and Tongans performing Maori war dances in New Mexico and Texas, while the life stories of Samoan players appear in film and in hardcover. In this essay we argue that the performances of Polynesian warriorhood and masculinity in American football embody the larger history of islander engagements with US empire, militarism and global capitalism in the Pacific. We focus on the University of Hawai‘i (UH) football team, whose ‘macho makeover’ as ‘The Warriors’– including a rejection of its ‘Rainbow’ traditions – reveals the racialized and gendered nature of sports marketing and recruiting. Our history of Hawaiians and Samoans in UH football sheds light on the ways that present flows of capital, images, and bodies follow familiar patterns of settler colonialism, military occupation, islander diaspora and indigenous struggle.

Performing Polynesian Masculinities in American Football: From ‘Rainbows to Warriors’

The Athletic Crusade is the first book to systematically analyse the role of sports in the expansion of U.S. empire from the 1890s through World War II. Gerald R. Gems details how white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males set the standard for inclusion within American society transferred that standard to foreign territories and subtly used American sports to instill allegedly desirable racial moral and commercial virtues in colonial subjects. In the realm of such expansion sports provided a less harsh less militaristic means of instilling belief in a dominant systema's values and principles than more overt methods such as war. The process of change however had unexpected consequences as subordinate groups adapted or even rejected American overtures. Sport became a means for nonwhites to challenge whiteness Social Darwinism and cultural hegemony by establishing their own physical prowess claiming a measure of esteem and creating a greater sense of national identity. Gems shows the direct influence of sports in Hawaii the Philippines Puerto Rico Cuba and the Dominican Republic and explores their comparatively minimal influence in countries such as China and Japan. Amid increasing globalization The Athletic Crusade offers a welcome perspective on how the United States has attempted to spread its influence in the past and the implications for the future of indigenous and other societies.

The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism

(1999). Contextualizing suburban soccer: Consumer culture, lifestyle differentiation and suburban America. Culture, Sport, Society: Vol. 2, Football Culture Local Contests, Global Visions, pp. 31-53.

Contextualizing suburban soccer: Consumer culture, lifestyle differentiation and suburban America.

Is football an athletic contest or a social event? Is it a game of skill, a test of manhood, or merely an organized brawl? Michael Oriard, a former professional player, asks these and other intriguing questions in Reading Football , the first contemporary book about football's formative years. American football began in the 1870s as a game to be played, not watched. Within a brief ten years, it had become a great public spectacle with an immense following, a phenomenon caused primarily by the voluminous commentary about the game conducted in popular newspapers and magazines. Oriard shows how this constant narrative in football's early years developed many different stories about what the game meant : football as pastime, as the sport of gentlemen, as a science, as a game of rules and their infringements. He shows how football became a series of cultural stories about power, luck, strategy, and deception. These different interpretations have been magnified by football's current omnipresence on television. According to Oriard, televised football now plays a cultural role of enormous importance for men, yet within the field of cultural studies the influence of football has been ignored until now. From the book: \"A receiver sprints down the sideline, fast and graceful, then breaks toward the middle of the field where a safety waits for him. From forty yards upfield the quarterback releases the ball; it spirals in an elegant arc toward the goalposts as the receiver now for the first time looks back to pick up its flight. The pass is a little high; the receiver leaps, stretches, grasps the ball--barely, fingers clutching--at the very moment that the safety drives a helmet into his unprotected ribs. The force of the collision flings the receiver backward, slamming him to the turf...This familiar tableau, this exemplary moment in a football game, epitomizes the appeal of the sport: the dramatic confrontation of artistry with violence, both equally necessary.\" |The first contemporary book about football's formative years. Oriard, a former professional football player, examines how American football changed from a game to be played to a game to be watched.

Warren Goldstein

Papers

Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle.