In every class organized society,
Sport serves a political function.
Capitalism supports a division of
sports into 'us' and 'them.
Progressive societies must use
sports to bring people back from
their lonely, tortured and shattered
worlds to their rightful human dignity.
...adapted from Arbeitsports
by Fritz Wildung
The Sociology of Sport can engage the student in affirmative postmoderrn
sociology as, perhaps, only sex and religion can. Below is an outline of a paper on
the Sociology of Sport...one may get the full
paper by double clicking on the title.
Five Ways to teach a Sociology of Sports:
- Most people who write/think/work in professional sports today adopt a structural
functional point of view. In this approach, one charts the various structures in
professional and amateur sports, records attendence, salaries, win/lose patterns,
auxilliary support institutions, financing, publishing, advertizing costs as well as
trends and social problems of athletes in their careers from little league to major league
play.
- For structural functionalists, sports helps build character, produce solidarity,
generate profits, provide jobs, expand the economy, entertain the public and supplement
the family as a source of self and social identity.
Social solidarity, especially, is of interest, especially to those who follow the ways of
Emile Durkheim. In brief, both amateur and professional sports offer a mechanical
solidarity to supplement the thin and depersonalized organic solidarity of divisions of
labor... ..more than that, sports offers a solidarity with which to transcend the social
differentiations which produce conflict and anomie...it is a matter of pride that sports
has lead the way in dismantling the legacies of racism which we inherited from slavery. It
is a source of uncertain pride that Title IX has begun to dismantle the ancient structures
of patriarchy in public games and sports. In Boston and in Green Bay, rich and poor alike
will cheer, chant, despair and rejoice as the ball takes its unlikely bounces.
Many primary groups will spend the better part of the day in those situated dramas of the
Holy which reunite and repair the harm done to friendships by time and distance.
Solidarity supplies will re-sanctify the social bonds; along with the drama of violence
played out on the television screen, alchohol, special fatty foods, chants, dances and
gaming will generate those extra-ordinary states which Durkheim noted as proof
demonstrative of the Super-Organic; of the reality of society assembled.
There is much merit to such work and it is done by sociologists of much merit. But there
are other paradigms not well explored by structural functionalism.
- There is also a freudian approach to the analysis of sports. In a freudian approach
football, basketball, base ball, golf and soccer are re-enactments of the primal scene in
which father and son struggle for sexual access to earth mother.
In this analysis, the goal line is the hymen of urmother, the bat is a phallic substitute,
the ball is the receptacle of sperm and the home run is the symbolic murder of urfather.
The golf club drive a smaller ball into a smaller hole.
In football, the scrimage line is the symbolic hymen and the fullback drives deep into the
sacred territory of the father figure. Basketball slam-dunk are seen, in the freudian
drama, as a triumph of the adolescent son over the unaccessible mother figure.
In baseball, the catcher's mitt is genital organ of earth mother while the pitcher is the
incestuous son trying to get pass the swinging bat of the guardian father.
In this analytic schema, sports is seen as alienated sexuality...and a freudian would
suggest that players grow up, find a suitable sexual partner and leave behind the
incestuous dreams of a child.
...for some freudians, sports is a harmless outlet for endemic anxiety, hostility toward
father/society/super-ego which, in Freud, are necessary constraints on the primitive urges
of the psyche.
- Many analysts see sports, cinema, television, play, poetry and other forms of culture
are 'divertissment' from the problems, disappointments, failures, frustration and
obstacles to success which is the common fate of all.
Adults stay in social harness; they work, plan and adjust to the adversities of
life...they do not run away into the world of make-believe and just-pretent...they work
hard all the days of their life nor do they laugh, play and ignore the problems of the
morrow.
- Marxism. There is a growing literature in cultural marxism which studies the ways in
which human consciousness is colonized by the capitalist class and by which theoretically
informed rebellion and resistence are deflected. Marcuse, Adorno, C.P. Thompson, Lukacs,
Gramsci and a hundred other cultural marxists make the case that the grace, elegance,
beauty and skill of athletes, musicians, dancers, poets, singers of song and writers of
prose are bought by corporations and are used to solve endemic problems of capitalism.
- The Realization Problem. Capitalism is a wonderful means of production but a terribly
constrained means of distribution...workers are not paid 100% of the value of the
goods/services they produce therefore they cannot buy back all that is produced.
This un-distributed part of production piles up; factories close, workers are laid-off and
economic crisis follows...
The problem, for the capitalist, is how to dispose of the 'surplus' product. There are
several solutions...all of which include generating markets above and beyond need.
War, consumer debt, welfare state, theft, and gifts are all non-capitalist systems of
re-distribution. They work to renew demand.
In the last 80 years mass media, depth psychology, social demographics, advertizing and
professional sports have become a vehicle for renewal of consumer demand. Both the
goodness of a Michael Jordan and the badness of a Worm Rodman help generate mass audience
to sports spectaculars and, from the audience, a market for high-profit, capital-intensive
goods and services is created. Thus market share is increased, surplus production
distributed, profits generated and capitalism renewed.
- A Postmodern Theological Analysis also helps the sociology student to understand the
interest in, resources devoted, and attention given to such sports events as the
Super-Bowl.
In this analysis, sports events are myths which help answer the central problematics of
social life. A myth grasps the basic concerns of a complex society and offers simple
solutions to them.
Every society needs use generate the awe, wonder, mystery, and magic of just-pretend and
make-believe as carrier and legitimator of those simple answers. In sacred societies, the
god concept and the dream world from which we came and to which we go offers basic plans
for life as well as guides on how to deal with the four questions of life:
- From where do human beings come?
- How do we relate to others with whom we have conflict?
- How do we survive the terrible tragedies of life and love?
- Where do we go when life is over??
As with pre-modern myths, games and sports events give answer:
- The community is our source and our future; the team is icon for community and must be
honored; its fate is our fate.
- The sports event reproduces the conflict and competition of social divisions and
cleavages. One must work on the team if one has a chance to survive in the stuggle for
existence.
- We survive the terrible and inevitable events of death, divorce and estrangement from
our children by faith in our friends. We draw upon that solidarity in times of trouble and
we give to that solidarity in ordinary times.
- We never really die if we work on and for the team. We live on in the lives of our
team-mates; in the lives of our children; and in the case of the teacher/preacher, in the
lives of our students.
CONCLUSION: Sports events are powerful stories about how we should live. They
are transcendent myths which give us inspriration in a impersonal massified and
de-sanctified society. They tell a story to the hundreds of millions who no longer go to
church...who no longer have a religious solidarity to which to turn and from which to draw
courage and faith for the morrow.
Sports, play, make-believe and just-pretend are too important to the human project to
leave to commodity capitalism. As Fritz Wildung said in the opening of this mini-lecture,
a good and decent society must possession of these most wondrous human products and keep
them oriented to the human condition.
TR Young
Summer, 1998
