Maureen M. Smith

So you can see how the other half lives. MTV "Cribs" use of "the other" in framing successful athletic masculinities.

MTVs popular television series “Cribs” displays the homes of famous athletes and entertainers. “Cribs” presents these male athletes and their households as exemplars of “making it.” This article examines the representation of male athletes and how various types of “successful” masculinity are conflated with race and class. We found two dominant models of successful masculinity, James Bond and Cool Pose. “Cribs” clearly demarcates between Black and White athletes, which essentializes race. Simultaneously, “Cribs” presents race as performative styles providing the audience with opportunities to consume “the other.” We argue that this paradoxical dynamic is utilized to sell the cool lifestyle and has multiple implications, including depoliticizing race, class, and gender.

Maverick's: big-wave surfing and the dynamic of ‘nothing’ and ‘something’

In this piece we explore one specific big-wave company, Mavericks Surf Ventures, and how it creates and distributes a distinct lifestyle product. We draw from Ritzer, who examines the tension in late capitalist processes between increased rationalization and increased distinction, or what he refers to as the dynamic between ‘nothing’ and ‘something’. We elaborate on the dynamic by discussing Ritzer and Stillmans analysis of ‘re-enchantment’ techniques that are used to counter the negative ramifications of overly rationalized consumer spaces. Nonetheless, these new spectacular, more intimate and ‘authentic’ postmodern spaces, which re-engage the consumer, are under-girded by modern rationalization strategies to maximize profit. In this case, Mavericks Surf Ventures exemplifies the tensions in late-modern capitalist processes: it creates a distinctive and ‘authentic’ brand by drawing on the unique geographical break; it celebrates the spectacle of big-wave riding; and it uses discourses that challenge modern rationality, especially how nature provides a transcendent experience. Yet, it uses very rational and standardized means to package and distribute the event and associated products.

Mapping America's Sporting Landscape: A Case Study of Three Statues

This article examines three sport statues in the United States: Pat Tillman, National Football League player and American soldier; Tommie Smith and John Carlos, 1968 Olympians; and Wilma Rudolph, the first American woman to win three gold medals in track and field at the 1960 Olympic Games. Each statue was analysed in material culture terms as a hegemonic representative of the dominant types of sport statue found in the USA and in terms of their role in American cultural sporting memory, heritage construction and myth-making. Key themes include their forms and functions, their processes of construction, the selection of the artist and the multiple readings of the statue by the public.

Revisiting South Africa and the Olympic Movement: The correspondence of Reginald S. Alexander and the International Olympic Committee, 1961–86

Reginald S. Alexander, an IOC member in Kenya since 1960, wrote hundreds of letters to three International Olympic Committee Presidents between the years 1961 and 1986. His correspondence with Avery Brundage, Lord Killanin and Juan Antonio Samaranch focused on the role of Africa in the Olympic Movement and later evolved into a campaign to re-examine the member status of South Africa in the Olympic Movement after its expulsion in 1970. Alexander and his written exchanges with the three presidents illustrate the primary theme discussed since the inception of the modern Games in 1896 – namely, the role of politics in sport.

Ballplayer or barrier breaker? Branding through the seven statues of Jackie Robinson.

Jackie Robinson is the baseball player most frequently depicted by a public statue within the USA, a ubiquity explained by his unique position as barrier breaker of the Major League colour bar. Utilising a detailed inspection of statue designs, locations and inscriptions, and comparisons with wider baseball statuary, Robinsons monuments reveal a distinctive set of cultural projections. These are commemorations distinguished by their age, location away from MLB ballparks, lack of action poses and their use of inscriptions consisting of platitudes or discourse on the subjects relationship with the statues location as opposed to athletic achievement. Such characteristics indicate that Jackie Robinson statues neither fulfil the typical role of branding host communities through nostalgia and reflected glory nor that of reparations. Instead, Robinsons statues act as mediators of reflected character and as tolerance branding. By projecting the softer aspects of Robinsons personality, and promoting a local history of racial tolerance as much as Robinsons triumph over wider intolerance, the host communities are seeking to identify themselves with these twin positive attributes. However, in neglecting a visual connection with baseball in the design and interpretative material, Robinsons statuary marginalises the relationship between his ability as a sportsman and his wider social impact.

From ‘The Finest Ballpark in America’ to ‘The Jewel of the Waterfront’: The Construction of San Francisco's Major League Baseball Stadiums

When the New York Giants moved west to San Francisco in 1958, they were welcomed by a city hungry for a professional baseball team. San Franciscos civic leaders saw the acquisition of a major-league team and the construction of a ‘big league’ stadium as an opportunity to put their rapidly growing metropolis on the map. Candlestick Park was touted as the stadium of the future when it opened, but its flaws were an ongoing controversy that led to the eventual relocation of the Giants to a privately-financed stadium in downtown San Francisco. AT&T Park was constructed as a means of connecting Giants fans to their historical past, rooting them firmly in San Francisco, but erasing Candlestick Park. The construction of both ballparks illuminates the efforts of the Giants and Bay Area urban boosters to fashion their own historical narrative of the citys team during two distinct eras.