Douglas Booth

(Re)reading The Surfers’ Bible: The affects of Tracks

I ride waves and I am a historian of surfing. Although I surf I do not engage surfing as a total cultural experience. I ride for physical and psychological pleasures: the adrenaline rush of the vertical drop, the elation of gliding across the face of a wave, the euphoria of passing under the lip of a spitting wave, the breathlessness of a long ride, and the arms tired by sustained paddling. Like all surfers I feel the weight of discipline imposed by surfing culture. In the water with others I abide by the ‘rules’: I don’t (deliberately) ‘drop in’ on a rider who is already on a wave, and I (rarely) ‘snake’ (paddle behind another surfer to seize the inside position). But I don’t feel a sense of deeply shared cultural bonds with other surfers: the pleasures experienced are mine alone. Beyond time in the water, my only contact with surfing culture comes from reading surfing magazines which I buy (through research accounts!) to stay abreast of political and social trends. In short, I read surfing magazines (Australia’s Surfing Life, The Surfer’s Journal and Tracks regularly, and Surfer, Surfing and Waves occasionally) for their historical, social and political content (e.g. Booth 2001a, 2005). In this article I reread Tracks: The Surfers’ Bible, a monthly Australian surfing magazine nearing four decades of continuous publication. As well as acknowledging the shifting socio-economic context of Tracks, I adopt what Myra Macdonald (2003, 2) calls a ‘spirit of openness’ to the text of the magazine and its presentation (material form). Why am I rereading Tracks, and rereading it in this manner? My interest derives from doubt concerning those approaches that analyse Tracks as a product of a highly gendered social structure. Leanne Stedman (1997) and Margaret Henderson (2001, 2002) both conceptualize Tracks within a ‘transmission model of communication’ (Macdonald 2003, 10–1) in which the magazine frames the cultural precepts of young surfers (i.e. telling them how to think and act, or limiting the range of options or alternatives as to how they might think or might act) in the interests of masculine hegemony. Stedman (1997) and Henderson (2001, 2002) offer some brilliant insights. The latter, for example, observes that Tracks promotes a range of masculinities that reside along

Politics and Pleasure: The Philosophy of Physical Education Revisited

Humans unquestionably derive pleasurable physical sensations from different types of movement. Yet, remarkably, there is a deafening silence around the subject in the literature on human movement. This article comprises three parts. First, I outline prevailing conceptualizations of pleasure as they relate to physical activity in the social sciences and biology. Second, I sketch the history of physical activity in modernity which I describe as a process of de-pleasuring, and third, I discuss the prejudice against pleasure in the academy and in state policy. In the conclusion, I propose pleasure as a potential pillar of disciplinary coherence in physical education.

Sites of Truth or Metaphors of Power? Refiguring the Archive

Historians have made extensive use of archives for retrieving knowledge about the sporting past. Indeed, most practitioners will agree that archives are indispensable storehouses of sources, particularly official documents. But some historians are also taking a second look at archives. Rather than conceptualizing archives as sites of knowledge, they view them as sites of power. This article examines the place of archives in sport history and looks at the growing scepticism in them as sites of historical knowledge. Drawing on examples from sport history that lend support to archive sceptics, this article calls on sport historians to refigure the archive. Refiguring refers to the processes of questioning the privileged place of archives in historical practice, opening them to ‘critical inspection’ and articulating their contexts.

Hitting Apartheid for Six? The Politics of the South African Sports Boycott

In the political struggle against apartheid, protesters and opponents of the South African regime adopted a range of strategies and tactics, including a boycott of sport. This article analyses and evaluates the effectiveness and significance of the sports boycott that passed through various stages with respect to objectives and goals. Boycotters initially sought to deracialize South African sport. By the early 1980s, the sports boycott was one of a raft of resistance strategies aimed at forcing the South African regime to abandon apartheid; by the end of that decade, supporters advocated the boycott as a strategy to build non-racial democratic sporting structures that would assist the transition to a post-apartheid society. While proponents insist that the boycott contributed directly to the abandonment of apartheid, this article suggests that the contribution was more indirect, that the deracialization of sport in the mid-1970s (under the impetus of the boycott) may have had a greater impact on the discarding of racial ideology in South Africa than commentators have thus far admitted.

Olympic city bidding: An exegesis of power

In this article I analyse the bidding process to host the olympics as a complex set of power relationships between the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and candidate cities. My analysis looks at both macro-political conditions and relationships and the micro-motives and psychological predilections of IOC members and the principals of candidate cities. Unlike traditional political studies that largely infer the goals and ambitions of individual members from the IOC’s collective interests, my approach considers the psychological basis of these interactions on its own terms. This interpretation loosely follows an interactive model of power and influence developed by Bertram Raven and grounded in political psychology. Importantly, the bidding process for olympic hosting rights provides insights into the omnipresent nature of power and its different forms that operate across macro- and micro-levels of society.

Evidence revisited: Interpreting historical materials in sport history

This article identifies the interpretation of historical materials as the essence of contemporary historical practice. It then compares three different approaches to interpretation, namely, reconstructionism, constructionism and decontructionism, through case studies of four common categories of historical materials found in the field of sport history: official documents, oral testimonies, films, and photographs. The key to understanding the three approaches, and hence different interpretations, lies in their respective objectives for history practice and in their epistemological assumptions. In analyzing the four categories of historical material, the article places particular emphasis on deconstructionist approaches. Critics typically associate deconstructionism with the fragmentation of knowledge and notions of relativism. However, close examination reveals that deconstructionist approaches to historical interpretation are considerably more rigorous and demand more sophisticated contextualization and theorization than is popularly held.

Escaping the past? The cultural turn and language in sport history

The cultural turn in sport history, and the accompanying shift from the study of sport as a social practice towards the interpretation of sporting cultures, ushered in a healthy new interest in the social and political power of language. However, notwithstanding closer attention from sport culture historians to the way their subjects use language (discourse, texts, narratives) to constitute, transmit and transform culture, few reflect critically on how they represent their own works. Sport culture historians continue to label such reflection a philosophical issue rather than one integral to the craft of history. This article suggests that sport historians could profit from reflecting explicitly on how they represent history; such reflection lies at the very heart of what Munslow (1997) calls ‘deconstructionist history’. At the very least, more explicit discussion about their own approaches, and inclusion of contemporary debates about language in culture and history, would help sport historians garner intellectual credibility for their field. At present, however, the disciplinary objectives of traditional empirical history continue to exert a vice-like grip on the field which even those who promote the language aspects of sporting culture seem unable to escape.

The South African council on sport and the political antinomies of the sports boycott

In the 1970s and 1980s the anti‐apartheid movement recognised the South African Council on Sport (SACOS) as its domestic sports wing. This article analyses and evaluates SACOSs politics in the context of apartheid, the international sports boycott and moves by the National Party to deracialise sport. In the belief that sport transcended race and politics, SACOS pursued negotiations with white sports officials to integrate and democratise South African sports. Failed negotiations, state harassment of SACOS leaders and a thorough analysis of the relationship between apartheid and sport, convinced SACOS that black sports people would continue to experience discrimination while apartheid existed. The international sports community and foreign governments agreed, and in the late 1970s the sports boycott became a strategy against apartheid per se. But SACOS assumed too much of the sports boycott; non‐collaboration became a principle rather than a strategy. SACOS refused to acknowledge government reforms, negot...

Nudes in the sand and perverts in the dunes

The trouble is that the nudists have no shame. They still think that they are in the Garden of Eden and have never heard of original sin. When my brother was six years old ... he came out of the bath with no clothes on. My father gave him such a whipping he still bears some of the scars, but at least he learned modesty. I believe the nudists should be horsewhipped until they bleed if necessary, so as they know the meaning of shame. A stint in the army would do them no harm, then force them to read the bible and give them a good sound whipping. That would instil some decency into them.

Sport history and the seeds of a postmodern discourse

Thirty years after its conception and development as a branch of social history, academic sport history is in a state of flux. The empirical, inferential and objective principles and tenets of modernist academic sport history face an increasing challenge from postmodernism, an explicitly self-conscious and reflexive form of thinking that is recasting history as a constructed discourse of the past. In this article I look at the growth of postmodernism and the extent to which it is redefining sport history as a new discipline. My initial focus is on the seeds of this growth, its conceptual, ideological, narratological and semiological features (Munslow 2007). Drawing on examples from sport history, I examine each of these seeds in turn, first, through the lens of modernist history and then postmodernism. In the concluding section, I identify areas of accommodation between modernist and postmodernist sport histories, and I discuss the potential for that accommodation to bloom into histories in which authors openly reflect on their work and their formats and methods, and reveal their ideological and political objectives as well as the limitations of their narratives. Rather than seeing postmodernism as antithetical to the goals of studying the past, I suggest that it can enrich critical perspectives on the past and the way we use the past for our present needs.