Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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b. 1903; d. 1998

Pediatrician to the

baby boomers

. Spock’s

Common Sense Book of Baby and Chil

Care

(first published in 1946 but undergoing multiple revisions and new editions

thereafter) revolutionized childcare for postwar America. He promoted warmth, creativity

and respect for the child’s individuality rather than discipline and distance (although later

hysicians and parents have challenged his ideas, ranging from guidance to nutrition). In

the 1960s, Spock also became a leader in the anti-

Vietnam War

movement so many o

his “children” had embraced; in 1972 he became the presidential candidate of the

People’s Party.

GARY McDONOGH

sports and gender

Radical changes have occurred in women’s sports in the United States, especially in the

last two decades, having a lasting impact on many aspects of American culture and

society. While women have not achieved parity—especially in professional salaries—it is

no longer a man’s game.

Victorian notions that women were physiologically inferior and that sports would

diminish a woman’s

femininity

began to give way to new notions about sport and gender

after the First World War. Two new perspectives towards sports emerged: one stressing

equal rights and access to a system already in place; the other, promoted initially by

female educators in the 1920s and picked up later by radical feminists, advocated

alternative sports (based on the notion that women were indeed different from men).

While proponents of the equal-rights view believed that facilities should be equal for both

sexes, and that women would begin to catch up with men once the effects of their

socialization were overcome, female educators tended to be more critical of the

commercialism and excessive competitiveness associated with organized sports and

wanted games that complemented what they considered “female” characteristics.

The passage of

Title IX

as part of the Educational Amendment of 1972 led to the

triumph of the equal-rights approach to sports. In order for

colleges and universities

receive federal funding, it became necessary for them to provide equal funding for men

and women. A redistribution of funding occurred to establish facilities and teams for

women in places where there had been none before. Discrimination is still evident, with

men’s college football programs eating up vast resources and women still receiving in

1996 only one-third of all scholarship money. Overall, male athletes receive $179 million

dollars more per year than female athletes. The change has nevertheless been a

momentous and irreversible one.

Moving together in terms of

body

types, sports considered anathema among women

before—body-building and

wrestling,

for example—are now engaged in with great

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enthusiasm. Others have been transformed as women have begun to incorporate men’s

approaches to particular games, or have become more physically capable of performing

the same feats.

Basketball

has seen a radical transformation partly as a result of the

success of the equal-rights approach to sport. In the 1940s the game most commonly

played was “girl’srules”

asketball, akin to the game called netball in Britain. On the

grounds that many women could not tax their hearts the same way as men without doing

themselves permanent physical damage, educators developed the game in which women

were confined to particular zones and were not allowed to dribble more than a few paces

before passing. This allowed for the emergence of a more passing-oriented game with

less physical contact than men’s basketball. By the 1960s this game was already losing

ground, and by the 1980s the game had all but disappeared except in a few elite colleges.

One irony of this transformation is that women who had taken on coaching positions in

the women’s game found themselves displaced by men who were more familiar with

men’s basketball. This was also an effect of Title IX generally since better-funded

women’s teams meant that coaching such teams became more attractive to men. The

visibility of some very successful women coaches, however, has challenged this gender

imbalance.

The notion of gender difference has survived, however. There has been no rush among

women to establish American

football

teams; this is not expected any time soon. Even in

basketball there is the assumption that women’s height disadvantage requires that their

game be one based less on dunking the ball through the hoop and more on shooting (with

lower field-goal percentages, since the basket is further away).

In another major sport,

softball,

the move towards the men’s game hasn’t occurred.

Perhaps because this game has been played on an informal basis by both sexes in parks

and colleges across the country it has retained legitimacy apart from traditional

baseball

Moreover, the proficiency of women in throwing fastballs, spitballs and curve balls

underarm has been such that the game has an appeal that is different from, but

complementary to, that of men’s baseball. Moreover, baseball officialdom has been very

slow to recognize the need to attract women as individuals and athletes to the sports

arena; instead, it has tended to rely on the notion that it is a

“family”

game, the whole

family turning out to watch the son perform. While women may have been content with

such a role in the past, the fact that little-league baseball is losing out to rising sports like

soccer

suggests that this is no longer the case. The one short-lived attempt to establish a

women’s baseball league, memorialized in

A League of their Own

(1992), was made

ossible by the exigencies of the World War. Nonetheless, it spurred many women to

continue to demand opportunities for themselves and their daughters in the years

following the war.

The accentuation of difference is especially noticeable in the commercial world o

advertising

. Sporting-goods producers, like other capitalists in the marketplace, have

realized that catering to different consumers is the key to selling more goods. While

automobile

manufacturers before them built cars to appeal to particular segments of the

market, thereby expanding the number of consumers overall, sporting-goods producers

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like Nike and Reebok have realized that they should be marketing their products to

different groups based upon gender difference. Whether or not actual differences do exist

(and the high level of demand for such women’s products suggest that many women feel

they do), completely different product lines exist in all goods from clothing to equipment

not just in terms of color but also in terms of design. The effect of stressing that women

have different feet and need different kinds of shoes, for example, serves both to bring

about product diversification and the suggestion to women who haven’t

run

before that

they perhaps might have done so had they not been discouraged by the male bias inherent

throughout sport. This gendering of sports products also means that women role models

like Chris Evert (

tennis

), Mia Hamm (soccer) and Linda Swoopes (basketball) can be

used to promote the goods to impressionable youngsters less impressed by Andre Agassi,

Alexi Lalas and Michael Jordan, respectively.

Sex appeal has also been an important element of sports promotion. While women

athletes’

ody types have transformed significantly in the years since the passage of Title

IX, with the increased level of training, so has the growing divergence in notions o

attractive female forms (identified by men and, perhaps more significantly, women

themselves). Women’s sports have made women’s bodies the objects of the spectator’s

gaze, and some women have used this to their advantage. The soccer team for the

Women’s World Cup of 1999 posed in T-shirts for a photo given to the David Letterman

Show. The establishment of the Women’s National Basketball Association was also

accompanied by hype that the players had more sex appeal than their counterparts in the

BA. Such appeal, though, is no longer always accompanied by gestures to

heterosexuality in the face of media and public scrutiny. While the old assumption that

the woman athlete may be gay (something that haunted both Billie Jean

King

and

Martina Navratilova, who later confirmed on the

Phil Donahue Show

that she was) is not

dead, it is muted nonetheless. Concern with female sexuality has also deflected

discussion of homophilic and homophobic behaviors in male sports, as well as rare cases

of “out” athletes like Greg

Louganis

(though the growing support for the Gay Games

suggests gay athletes may be more common in future). Many of these issues relating to

women athletes were raised in the movie

Personal Best

(1982).

Sexual difference has also been used in other ways. Women figure skaters and

gymnasts, for example, although many of them are capable of outperforming men in

terms of their ability to execute jumps and spins, will not do away with their different

styles of costume and performing and methods of adjudication since the present system

has demonstrated its audience appeal.

Two events in recent years have served well to highlight the transformation that has

occurred in sports. First the Atlanta

Olympics

of 1996, which for the first time saw an

equal number of women athletes as men performing. At the event, more interest was

shown in the women’s teams than the men’s in sports like softball (as compared to

baseball), basketball (in which the winner of the men’s event was a foregone conclusion)

and soccer. The success of these games led to the emergence of two professional

women’s basketball leagues (one of which was dismantled within three years). Similarly

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1058

great attention was given to the American women’s soccer team, which also captured the

gold medal, leading to considerable anticipation for the second event of note, the

Women’s World Cup held in the United States in 1999. The largest crowds ever to

witness women’s team events in the United States greeted every game in which the

American team played (the US eventually defeating China in the final). This can only

increase the interest among girls and women in this sport, perhaps reaching new,

untapped groups like

African Americans

who will have seen the numerous feature

stories on Briana Scurry.

The combination of these two events symbolizes the success of the equal-rights

approach thus far. Whether women are able to avoid some of the pitfalls of commercial

sports more generally and whether they should try to do so, are questions that remain

unanswered. The final verbal exchange of

Pat and Mike,

a 1952 movie about a male

promoter and a female athlete, suggests that the athlete will “own” the promoter. This

remains to be seen.

Further reading

Cahn, S.K. (1994)

Coming on Strong: Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Sport,

New Jersey: The Free Press.

Dyer, K.F. (1982)

Challenging the Men,

New York: University of Queensland Press.

Twin, S.L. (ed.) (1979)

Out of the Bleachers,

New York: Feminist Press.

(1996) “Women Muscle In,”

The New York Times Magazine

special issue, June 23.

ROBERT GREGG

sports and media

Television has been the central medium in sports since the end of the 1950s. It has

established

football

as the most lucrative of all sports, helped refashion

basketball

in the

1980s and has been the financial backbone for almost all the major sports. With the

emergence of

cable

channels like

ESPN,

the number of sports benefiting from

television

coverage has increased, and the bidding wars for major-league sports have become still

more intense. By 1996 sports consumed about 40 hours of every week on the four major

networks,

in addition to the 24-hours-a-day sports broadcasting on several cable

channels. Building on this nexus of sport and television,

newspapers,

talk radio,

magazines

and catalogs have raised sports to the level of virtual obsession.

The establishment of sports television as a major commercial and cultural force in the

United States is usually dated to December 28, 1958, when a national NBC audience

watched the Baltimore Colts come back to tie the New York Giants in the championship

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game of the NFL, and then, under the leadership of Johnny Unitas, win in suddendeath

overtime. Played in

New York

City (and so watched by key figures in

advertising

and

broadcasting), the game brought millions of new fans to the game of football.

Pete Rozelle, commissioner of football in the 1960s and 1970s, built on this newfound

strength. Negotiating with the networks on behalf of the league he managed to secure

large contracts (most notably the CBS bid of $14.1 million in 1964), revenues from

which were divided evenly among the teams, securing the financial health of even teams

in smaller markets.

Congress

complied, passing the Sports Antitrust Broadcast Act,

ermitting professional leagues to pool revenues and to sell their television rights as a

single entity.

The power of television was further demonstrated in 1970 during a mid-season game

between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. With the Giants leading, 32–29 and

with 65 seconds playing time remaining, NBC cut away from the game to show a

children’s special,

Heidi

. Meanwhile, in the game, the Raiders scored two touchdowns

and won 43–32. Ten thousand enraged football fans called NBC in New York, blowing a

fuse on its switchboard. Since then, no network game has been pre-empted, and even

sponsors of CBS’

60 Minutes,

which follows football on Sunday, do not mind being

delayed by overtime games.

Roone Arledge added Monday Night Football to the ABC prime-time schedule in

1970. With Howard Cossell, the most controversial sports commentator of his day, Don

Meredith and former star Frank Gifford, the show was an instant success. Even after the

addition of the tongue-tied O.J.

Simpson,

the dumping of Cossell and other personnel

changes, the show has remained strong, cementing a national audience for otherwise local

fixtures (though the hiring of comedian Dennis Miller as a commentator for the 2000

season suggests a less confident outlook at ABC).

The relationship between football and television has been a symbiotic one. The

networks were seen as crucial in the establishment of football; now football is seen by

television executives as fundamental to their network’s financial health. Thus, Rupert

Murdoch established FOX as a network to contend with in 1993 by bidding $1.6 billion

to win the right to televise NFL games for four years ($500 million more than CBS had

paid for the preceding four years), in addition stealing away CBS’

est commentary team,

John Madden and Pat Somerall. Although CBS had lost money on its previous contract, it

came back with an astonishing bid of $4 billion over eight years to wrest control of AFC

games from NBC. Owing to such network contracts (the total of which amount to $18

billion), the value of the average football franchise has now reached over $200 million.

Other sports have also been successful in using television, though, unlike in football,

focusing on players has often been crucial. Basketball was in the financial doldrums until

the mid-1980s when CBS made a deliberate move to concentrate all its efforts on games

featuring marquee players on major teams, such as Magic Johnson and Kareem

AbdulJabbar for the Los Angeles Lakers, Larry Bird for the Boston Celtics and Julius

Erving for the Philadelphia 76ers. This plan paid off with the ascendancy of the Chicago

Bulls’ Michael

Jordan,

considered the best player ever to play the game. The downside

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1060

has been witnessed in Jordan’s second retirement, followed by declining basketball TV

ratings as the sport waits for its next crop of stars to emerge.

Golf similarly has benefited from the sudden arrival of Tiger

Woods

. Prior to Woods’

emergence, networks expected major

golf

championships to be watched in approximately

20 million homes. In 1997, when Woods captured the Masters, about 30 million homes

tuned in. The $100 million investment the networks made in professional golf began to

produce a much better return.

The impact of TV has been seen in the way the games themselves are performed.

Almost every team sport now has additional timeouts to allow for commercials (

soccer

has found it more difficult to gain large television revenues because it doesn’t have such

commercial breaks). The result is longer games. One hour of football or basketball takes

3 hours to play. In addition, television officials believe that to draw viewers they must

avoid having ties, so most sports now institute sudden-death overtimes.

Often the success of a sport is determined not by the number of people who participate

in the game, but by the number who will watch on television. Tennis “arrived” with Billie

Jean

King’s

1973 “battle of the sexes” against Bobby Riggs; the success of women’s

soccer

was acknowledged when the 1999 World Cup pulled down a better rating than

that year’s NBA playoff. This has been frustrating for enthusiasts of new sports,

especially since the major sports of football,

baseball

and basketball have been able

(largely through exemptions to antitrust legislation) to establish virtual monopolistic

control over the networks. With the arrival of cable and the overall threat to the existence

of the networks, this vaunted position for the major leagues is no longer guaranteed. All

kinds of games are now seen on television, not merely those shown on ABC’s

Wide

World of Sports

Journalists at newspapers have tended to be boosters for their

cities

and the teams they

cover. A surface indignation about racism, sexism, commercialism and other excesses in

different sports (like the failure of players to be good “role models”) is often undermined

by the clamor for good performances from their cities’ teams. Some change may be

expected as more women journalists and commentators are read in print and seen on

television, from the pre-game shows to the commentary boxes. Issues have arisen,

however, as a result of revelations concerning the parentage of Alexandra Stevenson, a

rising

tennis

star whose mother, the sports journalist Samantha Stevenson, contested

restrictions placed on women journalists’ access to sportsmen at the end of the 1970s.

The fact that her interviews with Julius Erving led to the conception of their daughter has

resulted in some women journalists feeling let down, and some sports officials

maintaining that their opposition to such contacts had been justified.

The long-time standard in sports journalism has been

Sports Illustrated,

ut each sport

has its own magazines, some independent, others run by national and regional sports

federations. In addition to such magazines, each sports enthusiast can expect the arrival in

the mail of a plethora of

catalogs

promoting sporting goods. This saturation has carried

over into

talk radio

and television sports news programs, during which the performance

of local teams, their coaches and owners are dissected. Such programming is now so

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common that a

sitcom,

Sports Nïght

(ABC), has been loosely based on them.

Further reading

Davies, R.O. (1994)

America’s Obsession,

Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.

ROBERT GREGG

sports and race

Most professional sports have fostered continued institutional racism, although overt

segregation

generally ended after the Second World War. However, with former players

who are

African American

beginning to achieve management and ownership positions

on teams, there are signs of change occurring. Black advancement has paved the way for

Latinos

and Asians, but issues of

immigration

and stereotyping also affect their levels o

participation.

During the first half of the twentieth century nearly all sports were segregated,

boxing

eing the most important exception. In this sport, Jack Johnson won the world

heavyweight title, receiving considerable vilification from white Americans for doing so

and beginning the search for the “great white hope” in that sport, which continued when

the sport became dominated by African Americans. Joe Louis was greeted with more

favor from

whites,

in part because he represented the nation against Hitler’s champion,

and whites began to classify black boxers as either “good” or “bad”

egroes. The former

includes Louis and Joe Frazier, and the latter men such as Muhammad

Ali

(who both

converted to

Islam

and refused to fight in the

Vietnam War

) and Mike Tyson. The

stereotyping implicit in these characterizations provides just one example of the way

forms of discrimination continued even when a sport appeared to be integrated.

The other two sports that opened doors to blacks relatively early were

track and field

and

basketball

. In the former, the importance of the

Olympic Games

and of

colleges

and universities

which counted a few African Americans among their students meant

that a few great athletes could make their mark and bring about a demand for other black

athletes. Jesse Owens winning four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics made a

lasting impression on track and field. Once colleges and universities were forced to

integrate more fully in the 1950s and 1960s, they quickly began to encourage more black

athletes to join their sports programs.

In the case of basketball, also, some black athletes played for white varsity teams

outside the segregated

South,

but only rarely did they start for the team or gain pivotal

roles on the court. The major change occurred with the success of the Harlem

Renaissance, a team made up primarily of West Indian immigrants and

Philadelphia, PA

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 1062

players. The Rens’ victories over the (then

New York

) Celtics during the 1930s heralded

the beginning of integrated basketball, though Southern universities still resisted for

decades.

But the great landmark in the fight against segregation occurred in baseball with the

signing of Jackie

Robinson

to the Brooklyn Dodgers organization. Baseball, at the time

the “American game,” had excluded blacks from the 1890s, and had bitterly resisted

integration during the 1920s and 1930s, even when it was clear that many of the best

layers in the country were playing in the Negro Leagues. Jackie Robinson played his

first game in a Dodgers’ uniform in 1947 and was so successful that he was followed by

other leading players from the Negro Leagues, which subsequently disbanded. A number

of teams like the Philadelphia Phillies and

Boston

Red Sox resisted the pressure to hire

lack players and often taunted those African Americans playing for opposing teams. But

y the early 1960s integration was well established throughout the National League.

Baseball also opened up to Latino players from

Puerto Rico, Cuba,

the Dominican

Republic and, in the 1990s, to a few Japanese ballplayers.

However, a shift in racism occurred very rapidly from segregation to structural

inequalities and racial stereotyping. In many sports like

golf

and

tennis,

for example, a

certain degree of wealth was required before a person could reach the highest level of the

game. For many years after integration was firmly established this limited the number o

lack players reaching the highest levels. In many cases, country clubs would practice

forms of discrimination, especially against

Jews

and blacks, leading to players being

excluded from membership and competitions. African Americans like Charlie Sifford in

golf, and Arthur

Ashe

or Althea Gibson in tennis, were the exceptions helping to pave the

way for current players like Tiger

Woods

and the Williams sisters. Michael Chang has

been the one

Asian American

star. His career has been followed perhaps more closely in

Asia than America.

Other kinds of stereotyping have been very common. In many sports certain positions

are considered “thinking” positions—guards in basketball, quarterbacks in

football,

pitchers in baseball, for example—and these have tended to be associated with whites.

This has led to obvious structural inequalities with the more elite, visible positions

dominated by white players. For many years, it was impossible for a black college

quarterback to get onto an NFL team except as a wide receiver or running back. This has

egun to change with the success of quarterbacks like Doug Williams, Randall

Cunningham and Warren Moon, but the changes have been slow in coming, and teams

have often showed such players less loyalty than their white counterparts.

Moreover, the assumption that black players rely on athleticism rather than intelligence

has meant that relatively few have been able to break into coaching after their playing

careers have ended. When Al Campanis commented on ABC’s

Nightline

commemoration

of Jackie Robinson that blacks were good athletes but would not be good managers, he

stated what was the unspoken rule in baseball at the time. The storm of protest following

this broadcast actually began the shift away from this practice. Changes have occurred as

African Americans begin to gain visibility in all positions and as coaches. But even

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successful coaches, like Dennis Green at the Minnesota Vikings (in football), feel that

they receive more criticism from their fans and management than they would if they were

white. The high turnover of African American coaches suggests that they are correct.

There are also racial assumptions regarding the way different games are played.

Commentators and journalists will often assume that African Americans bring “street”

traditions and natural athleticism to games, and that they need coaching and discipline

from white coaches to shape their games and make them most effective. CBS football

analyst, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, even suggested that this was a result of anatomical

differences between the races. The assumption that blacks are natural while whites

disciplined means that a bad streak of performances for a white player will lead to calls

for patience and nurturing, while a bad streak for a black player will lead to a belief that

the player has lost his or her gift, followed by demands that the player be traded.

Moreover, such racial stereotypes give white coaches undue license to treat their players

in demeaning ways in the name of discipline, without reprimand from management or

college authorities. This has led to friction on occasion—all-star basketball player, Latrell

Sprewell, assaulted his coach after such treatment. Meanwhile, black coaches, on the rare

occasions when they are appointed, have sometimes been unfairly criticized for

identifying too much with their players.

Certain sports remain dominated by whites. Some remain so because of the legacy o

past racial stereotypes—like the assumption that blacks do not make good swimmers.

Others derive from regional and

class

differences. Seldom have their been any black ice-

hockey

players, even though the market has now extended to the whole country.

Dominique Dawes has been a pioneer for African Americans in women’s gymnastics.

Soccer, a game largely associated with the

suburbs

and immigrants, may see boosted

interest among African Americans following the success of Briana Scurry in the

Women’s World Cup of 1999. Asian Americans, stereotyped as non-athletes, have a low

profile, except in women’s

figure skating

Basketball remains the team sport most associated with blacks, but white players are at

a premium. Teams in certain markets will often endeavor to encourage a white player o

limited abilities to come to their team in the hope that the largely white crowds will

identify with the player. Such players will also generally receive disproportionately large

salaries. However, the success of players like Magic Johnson, Julius Erving and, above

all, Michael Jordan has diminished this tendency. It remains to be seen whether these

players have the same success after the game in coaching and ownership (Johnson’s

move into agency and Erving’s association with the Orlando Magic suggest that there is

some movement at this level).