Dr. Ted's Sport & Pop Culture Blog

Of slime and smackdowns: Linda McMahon the candidate

2010-09-08T20:50:00.000-07:00

In August 2010, Linda McMahon won the Connecticut Republican Senate Primary. Linda McMahon is not just the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment and wife of WWE chairman Vince McMahon, but a former character in the tweaked narratives on WWE television as well. Perhaps most importantly, she was also in an executive position during a period in which many WWE performers were consuming massive amounts of steroids, growth hormone, and pain pills. Some of the wrestlers died of heart failure, like one-time world champion Eddie Guerrero, while others, like Guerrero's good friend Chris Benoit, killed his family and then himself as massive amounts of testosterone coursed through his bloodstream and enlarged heart. Benoit's brain was also determined to be severely damaged from years of hard chair shots and multiple concussions. On the bright side, lest we get too grim here, McMahon also presided over the development of the WWE's "wellness policy" after these and other fatalities. Check out her testimony at the congressional oversight hearings on steroids in pro wrestling for a laugh. Better late than never, certainly. That said, former WWE wrestlers continue to take advantage of the WWE's ongoing offer to pay for drug rehab for any former performers. Scott Hall, aka Razor Ramon, is the most recent person to take a trip on the WWE's bill. All of this intro material is to set up the question of whether any of it should have to do with Linda McMahon's senate bid. Of course it will, in our current smear culture of politics. But I am trying to look at her qualifications critically. Much like our gubernatorial candidate in California, Meg Whitman, McMahon helped lead a major publicly traded corporation through good times and bad, leaving it in a pretty good state. She spearheaded the "Smackdown your vote!" campaign to encourage voter registration, and perhaps most admirably, while she was at WWE the company made yearly trips to Iraq to perform for troops during the Christmas holidays. At first it was, perhaps, a PR stunt, but over the years, the attention waned, as did the ratings. The company still made the trip. This is a great case...it mixes pop culture, spectacle, the profane, business, gender, economics, steroids, and the US government. Whatever the outcome of the fall election, McMahon at least has some kind of legacy, as shown in the video below.

The many faces of...a knee

2010-09-05T20:01:00.000-07:00

You can take one on the field, or receive one to the face. You can skin one, or bandage one. You can keep them up, or blow them out. You can operate on one, but you can't operate with only one. You can fully or partially replace one, and even bury a heart at a wounded one. You can have your reflexes tested by tapping on one of them, and your faith tested when you're on both of them. I'm talking about the knee, of course. Have you ever thought about the place of the knee in sport and popular culture? Ask someone what they think about when they hear the word "knee." Will they reflect upon a healthy knee? A knee that needs repair? The stability the knee provides? The efficiency with which the knee moves? The aches our knees provide as we age? The practice of kneeling in religion? The knee as a reference point in "proper" skirt length over the decades? The depth of trouble one can be in? A knee can be your best friend, and your worst enemy. We don't often think about our knees when everything is going well with them. It's only when something goes awry that we look down, sigh, and shake our heads as if to ask, "Come on, knee! What did I ever do to you?" The knee doesn't have as much cultural meaning as the head, let's say, or the foot...or even the finger. But whether straight or bent, the images of the knee in our minds remain...flexible.

A couple random videos

Gazing at effort(lessness)

2010-08-29T21:58:00.000-07:00

The sport studies literature contains many references to "racially biased language." This basically means that the language of commentators, newscasters, etc. contains some sort of bias that relates directly to race. The most common example cited in textbooks is that white athletes in sports such as football and basketball have often been described as "hard working," while black players have been described as "naturally talented." We see less of this today, at least in basketball, according to some recent work. Track athletes have also been racialized in particular ways. East African distance runners, in particular, have been lauded for their supposed "effortlessness" and "fluidity" while white runners who are fortunate enough to get the better of their ostensibly inferior genetic makeup and/or socialization patterns have been described as "grinding" or "gutting" out personal bests. The research on race, population genetics, and sport performance is incredibly complex, and anyone who tries to tell you a definitive answer should be viewed with suspicion. All athletes and exercisers have experienced times when completing a task required little work, or when moving was a real chore. I deeply appreciate the beauty of effort in all its forms, from a child struggling to sit upright for the first time, to the aging athlete's attempt to build muscle, even as the mitochondria prepare to throw in the towel. Check out the two 800-meter world records below. These two runners are part of only a trio of runners to ever break 1:42 in the 800. One is from August, 2010, and the other is from back in 1981. Both are amazing to watch...their strides are strikingly different, and their efforts show in different ways and at different times...yet each makes my jaw drop.

Moonwalks, muscles, and corporeal murals

2010-08-24T20:37:00.000-07:00

I've blogged about sport-as-art previously, but since the 2010 Mr. Olympia competition is right around the corner, I thought I'd revisit the relationship between sport, art, and the body in motion. Think about the term "bodybuilder," and what comes to mind? Is it a perfectly symmetrical upper body with sweeping, yet proportional thighs? Is it a more freaky body, with enormous traps and legs that dwarf the manhood between them? Is it...our lame duck governator Arnold? Or is it merely a stage that only a chemist could love? All of these things come to mind for me, at one time or another. Recently, what comes to mind is the body as a work of organic art, or evolving art, or enhanced art, and of ironic art. In particular, I have been thinking about one of the top bodybuilders, Kai Greene, and how he represents something that is sometimes lost in our spectacle-laden (or driven?) culture. In fact, many sport studies scholars might say it is all BUT lost. Kai Greene is huge. He is around 5'8" and around 260+ pounds. But Kai Greene is an artist...in many ways. He sees the sport as art, and he himself is an artist in the traditional sense, a painter specifically. Some purists complain that Kai's posing routines (see one guest routine below) do not really accentuate his strong points, but rather obscure them in a whirlwind of fluid movements. Strike a pose, squeeze, and hold it...that is how it is generally done. Not headstands. Not moonwalking. Not miming. In a hypercorporatized sporting environment, I tend to root for the artist. The artist could give a damn about convention, and may even sacrifice economic gain for what he or she views as their own authentic creative endeavor, as poesis. Of course, the artist may profit, but its a gamble. We'll see how Kai Greene fairs on September 25th, but whether or not he improves upon his 4th place from last year, I will admire his attempt to centralize art, creativity, and perhaps even (more than a bit of) flamboyance in an event ripe with ironies and overflowing with jacked up bodies.

Watch your &@!*&%# mouth!

2010-08-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

Several recent articles in the popular press have discussed the appropriateness of using curse words, including the dreaded f-bomb, in professional settings. Think former VP Dick Cheney's "fuck yourself" to a Democratic senator, or VP Joe Biden's "big fuckin deal" following the health care bill. Yes, it goes straight to the top, folks! The sporting realm has, of course, had its own encounters with spicy language. Rex Ryan is the head coach of the New York Jets football team. In the first episode of this season's HBO "reality" show Hard Knocks, Ryan used an array of 4-letter words during a team meeting. He actually seems quite adept at stringing curse words together in creative, if non-academic, ways. In the days after the show aired, former NFL coach Tony Dungy, a self-described Christian and the "mentor" of Michael Vick, issued some harsh words (minus the spice) regarding Ryan's language. Witness the policing of the NFL's image taken to an absurd level. An improved but still flawed drug policy, an improved yet still tenuous concussions policy, a game predicated on violent collisions...but an obese, obnoxious, gutter-mouthed coach is something to rise up against? As the kids say, or rather text...WTF! Critical consumers of sport should point out hypocrisy when we see it. I love a good intellectual argument and some homestyle (sub)cultural critique as much as anyone...but to hold one's breath for a fundamental shift in the neanderthal-esque culture of pro football is foolish...not to mention dumb as fucking shit.

(may be removed so watch asap!)

Full Court Farce

2010-03-17T20:05:00.001-07:00

President Obama was on television today filling out his 2010 NCAA basketball tournament bracket. One of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Keith Harrison, recently said in my class that the tournament was kind of like a hot dog--once you know what's it in, you really don't want anything to do with it. I think most people would eat the hot dog anyway, frankly, but what concerns me is that many on the political Right-wing continue to label Obama as a Left-leaning (or lurching) liberal. Here is the deal: If Obama were a true progressive and political leftist, he might have said one of the following today:

1. My fellow Americans, until the colleges and universities in the NCAA tournament raise their graduation rates, and close the gap between Black and White players, I cannot in good conscience support them being out of school for days, let alone weeks. It is a disservice to the educational process, and makes the term"student-athlete" more of a sham that it already is.

2. My fellow Americans, while many of you falsely label me a socialist, if you even understand the meaning of the term, I fully support the players-as-laborers receiving a fair cut of the massive profits that the NCAA makes on the tournament. This is clear exploitation, and the refusal to compensate the athlete-entertainers while the power structure and networks make tens of millions of dollars is a debased form of capitalism. I cannot fill out my bracket until this is rectified.

3. My fellow Americans, I will fill out my bracket, but this year, I am picking the team in each matchup with the highest APR score and graduation rate. I may not win the White House pool, but hey, I'm the president and I'm making a statement. In fact, I might as well go on television and fill out the women's tournament bracket, since they graduate, overall, at much higher rates than the men do.

There you have it. On this issue, at least, Obama is as conservative as the Evangelicals. It is, appropriately enough, a slam dunk. Below is a link to the graduation rates for the men's tournament teams. Think about these issues as you drink Dick Vitale's kool-aid.

http://web.bus.ucf.edu/documents/sport/2010_Mens_Bball_PR.pdf

Sodom, Gomorrah, or None of the Above?

2010-02-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

American female athletes pose semi-nude in Sports Illustrated before the Olympics even begin, and all is right with the world. Men have more idealized images to consume, and the athletes claim the pictorials are "sexy not sexual." Fast-forward a few weeks...Canadian female hockey players, covered from neck to blade with nary a cleavage in sight, do some celebrating on the ice after their gold medal performance and that is somehow in bad taste? They disgraced Canadian national identity, the sanctity of the Olympic ice, and shockingly, appeared to not give a damn what anyone thought. They reclined on the ice, smoked cigars, downed Molsen Canadian, and generally had a blast. I don't have a daughter, and I hope I never do frankly. But if I ever found a baby girl on my doorstep and was forced, against my will, to raise her myself, I'd certainly prefer that she live in a world where we smile, even applaud images of supposed female athlete debauchery rather than fawn over the topless, commodified, and cliched women in SI.

Faux Fellatio, Faux Pas, and Faux Outrage

2010-02-21T22:10:00.000-08:00

So, snowboarder Scotty Lago wins an Olympic bronze medal, and simulated oral sex ensues. If sport is a pillar of popular culture, and pornography has become more mainstream, as many cultural critics have argued, then why the feigned moral outrage? Tasteless? Some might say, though I have personally seen far worse in public...ok, years ago in college, but nevertheless! Numerous comments were directed at the fact that he was wearing his Team USA t-shirt at the time, since...you know, the US Olympic Committee is the paradigmatic example of all that is good and pure. It is a fact that numerous positive doping tests have been covered up or otherwise ignored by the various US national sporting organizations over the decades, and yet this relatively harmless act caught on cellphone celluloid somehow besmirches the valued brand name of Team USA? Young people around the globe are "sexting" until their fingers (among other things) are blue, and somehow this photo is shocking? Several of the US female Olympians posed in playboy-style pictorials for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, althoughthe swimsuit was clearly absent in parts of the shoot. (http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010_swimsuit/winter/) All this leaves me on my knees now too...mouth wide open, and gagging...on double standards, sanctimonious outrage, and hypocrisy.

Faces of Death Redux

2010-02-15T18:11:00.000-08:00

When I was in high school in the 80s, the "cool" thing to do, at least among my motley crue of oft-suspended, nonathlete friends, was to find someone who was 18 so they could rent the Faces of Death videos for us. Long before anyone used the term "reality programming" or posted their skateboarding injury videos on YouTube, these videos were meant to shock viewers with scenes of hapless individuals meeting their demise...on camera. The death of the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on the eve of the Vancouver Olympics was a tragedy that, not surprisingly, aired a couple nights later on national television. The athlete's ragdoll body launching into the air, slamming into the steel beam, and finally coming to rest in a near-lifeless heap...it was unsettling, certainly, but the footage clearly showed the danger of the sport, and the fact that, despite their strong constitutions, elite athletes are as fragile as you and I. Many news outlets have now criticized NBC for showing the luge accident, but wouldn't not showing it have been worse? For a generation raised on "reality" television and the consumption of violent media images, and at a time when the NFL seeks to sugarcoat the potential risks of pro football, might we view the luge footage as a piece of relative honesty by the corporate media? Sport has risks. You can die in sport. Here is a reminder. Thanatos...no chaser. Citius, Altius, Fortius, Mortium.

Manning, mooning, and misogyny

2010-02-08T21:01:00.000-08:00

I was an athlete at the University of Tennessee once upon a time, and this trainer (Jamie) was always amazingly kind to me. When I ruptured my plantar fascia, she drove me to the doctor's office many times. I could not have even defined sexual harassment back then honestly. I was a dumb kid with a mullet, but i do remember her getting harassed by guys almost every day. I remember feeling uncomfortable, and even though she often "joked" back to the athletes, she never looked all that comfortable either. Either way, when Peyton Manning walked off the field yesterday dejected and demoralized, I thought of Jamie and how karma is a beeeeatch. Seriously though, women trainers shouldn't have to endure scumbag behaviors by privileged male athletes, however squeaky clean their public image happens to be.

Here is a Wiki blurb, but just google for mainstream coverage of the settlement:

In 1996, while still quarterback at the University of Tennessee, Manning dropped his pants while being treated by assistant athletic trainer Jamie Ann Naughright. After an investigation, the university concluded the incident was a "mooning" gone awry and not sexual in nature, and Manning was disciplined and required to apologize in writing to Naughright. In 1997, the university settled Naughright's sexual harassment claims (which included the Manning incident) for $300,000. In 2003, Manning settled a 2002 lawsuit filed by Naughright, on confidential terms. In the suit Naughright had alleged that "Manning: A Father, His Sons and a Football Legacy", a book written by Manning, his father, and author John Underwood, defamed her.

Herschel Walker and age(less) motivation

2010-01-31T21:32:00.000-08:00

This weekend, former NFL running back Herschel Walker won his first ever pro MMA event on the Strikeforce show in Florida...at age 47. The thing that impressed me was not his physique, which looked "natural" though impressive, or his cardio (which many writers have commented on), but rather his approach to the entire endeavor. After the match, he said it was the hardest thing he had ever done (think about that for a second), and gave credit to his opponent. He also mentioned that one of his motivations for trying MMA at his age was just to see if he could do it. To challenge himself. We could learn something from Walker's intrinsic motivation here, and I am sure the domain of older MMA participants is ripe for research from sport psychology and sport sociology, and motor learning and development. Not that I'm advocating hordes of 40-somethings stepping into the cage, obviously! My point is that regardless of Walker's very "green" abilities, he pushed himself into a new domain, in the public eye, and while he certainly benefitted from the exposure, our perceptions of older adults and what they can do got a rub as well.

Skanky sport celebrity...and manufactured hysteria

2010-01-27T20:05:00.000-08:00

Ok we are back fresh for 2010! We will be updating regularly from here on out. So... I figured I would start with a simple question: Have you read the endless, frequently sanctimonious articles and blogs on Tiger Woods and his copious sexual exploits outside the confines of his marriage? Please stop reading them. Certainly, as a paradigmatic example of a celebrity athlete (see the book Sport Stars: The cultural politics of sporting celebrity by David Andrews & Steven Jackson), we can understand why sportswriters, bloggers, and supermarket tabloid readers would be fascinated in the same way they were with A-Rod and Madonna or TonyRomo and Jessica Simpson. That does not make it worth our time, however. I refuse to care about where Tiger puts his putter...or his driver for that matter. In fact, this is the last time I will even acknowledge it. His life is in the deep rough, for sure, but the economy and the job market are mired in a fiercely devilish sand trap. Let's hope they, at least, get back on the fairway.

I'm still alive

2009-08-30T20:35:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to the magical land of furloughs, paycuts, and fee raises! The first entry in quite some time is not related to sport, really. However, I have seen the same phenomenon as we see in this Pearl Jam video below at many sporting events. The video was from a concert Saturday night in Golden Gate Park, and as you can see, the experiences of many concertgoers were at least occasionally mediated by their cell phone cameras or digital cameras. Questions arise, of course, about how this fits in with Jenkins' (2006) notion of Convergence Culture, since the videos are user-generated and posted on youtube, only to be edited by yours truly and posted on this blog for purposes other than their value to online fan communities. I am more interested here in the experience of "live" sporting or entertainment events, the role fans play as mediators of their own sensory experiences, and the actions of fans-as-generators of an experience for others who did not have the luxury of attending in person. What do we make of the video when the person filming pans away from the sea of other cameras filming Eddie and the band to the big screen? At MMA events I have caught myself watching the HD screen above the cage rather than on the fighters themselves. "They look so clear!" I remember telling someone, about the image of the fighters on the screen. "Reality" is often blurred or obscured, by a cage, by other fans filming their own versions of reality, or by the 3 inch rectangle that can never capture what our roving eyes can. Sometime in grad school I read an article on how the box scores in baseball changed the way we can experience the game (via statistics versus richer phenomenological cues). I wonder what the author would write about the knowing of a game, a fight, or a match through the disjointed attentional endeavors of people flipping (off) the live fantastic? At least we know the words well enough to sing along? Indeed, perhaps we want only to hear our own voices, see our own versions of the digitally enhanced performance, and experience the "thing itself" not through the Heidegger's "lived body," but rather through the detached and mediated/ing interface body that is itself performing back at that which it is so preoccupied with filming. Cyborg fandom and its peculiarities.

Pearl Jam Through The Looking Glass(es)

Let's get physical, physical...

2009-04-21T23:02:00.000-07:00

I wanna get physical. Let's get into physical. Let me hear your body talk--Olivia Newton-John (1981)

If Heidegger is correct in his assertion that the body is the point of insertion into the world, and numerous media & technology theorists are correct in arguing that the conscious self is incorporated into, if not engulfed by, interface cultures, then what can we make of this NYT story on Nintendo wii videogame injuries? The lived body suffers due to damage inflicted via extended interfaces of the consciousness with the game program. Simple enough...but what about accountability? Who is injured, who caused the injury, and is the phenomenology of interface body breakdowns something to further investigate? This is not merely wordplay. If the body suffers as a result of its lived experience in a world that the body inserts itself into, and a secondary (virtual) world the body again re-inserts itself into, does the consciousness have a legitimate claim of abuse? Does the psyche enjoy the ride while the body pays the fair? Has the disconnect between lived corporeal experiences in the wild/unsafe outdoors and the virtual world become an irreparable schism? Do we now embrace the experience of simulacra over the hopeless quest for "authenticity"?

Interface Physical Education

Endangered species?

2009-04-19T23:39:00.000-07:00

The fastest white guy...the great white hope...the hard working guy overcoming a lack of natural talent. Critical whiteness scholars argue that the "new racism" involves several factors, such as: 1) an increasingly open racial discourse in which ideas, preconceptions, and biases about race are no longer taboo, 2) the avoidance of racial terminology altogether, and accompanying claims of “reverse racism” by whites, 3) the invisibility of the mechanisms (i.e. institutional practices) by which racial inequalities are reproduced, 4) a growth in so-called “safe minorities” who, according to critical race scholars, may do little to promote progressive racial change, and 5) a rearticulation of some racial practices that hearkens back to a past era (Bonilla-Silva, 2003). Not everything is "about " race," certainly. What I wonder though, is how many people respond with nods to this Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder clip from the 1980s? He was fired then, and he would be now, but was he articulating a point shared only by a few Klan members? Surely it is not only Joe the Plumber salivating over this, right? Can we engage with whiteness studies without...falling pitfall to white guilt (as scholar bell hooks noted) OR white exceptionalism? Or pitfall to indifference? To despair? To rhetoric? To biological OR sociological determinism that shuts off honest discourse? When does an "offhand comment" become newly relevant or hopelessly dated? How do sport gamers recreate sporting spaces with re-representations of their racialized selves-as-avatars? Will we move past, or otherwise more intelligently negotiate, this issue once we recognize the insignificance of a minuscule genetic marker like skin color that we attach so much meaning to? Will academics have a damn thing to do with helping to answer these questions?

Priceless racial thinking by 1980s sport media

To seek out new civilizations...and choke them out

2009-04-15T23:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, a small break from the serious academic portion of this blog. People often credit Royce Gracie with being the first person to put MMA on the radar of the American popular consciousness, and certainly the Gracie family must be central to any telling of the UFC organizational biography. However, in anticipation of the upcoming re-imagining (aka: Hollywood speak for "We have no new ideas but we know how to market nostalgia.") of Star Trek, I offer this. Could Kirk's battle against the physically superior, genetically altered Kahn have boldly set the tone for contemporary MMA? You be the judge. No groin shots, no fish hooking...and no Vulcan nerve grips. We'll beam you up to more enlightened discourse in a few days...

UFC 238: Violent Enterprise
(notice how Kirk uses the cage @ 38 seconds)

Greening of the pitch, pitching of the green

2009-04-12T22:09:00.000-07:00

According to Theodore Roszak's first book on Ecopsychology (1992), while the mind is partly shaped by/within social, cultural, and historical contexts, it also has a deep and fundamental connection with the "natural" world, and the planet, more generally. Thus, in one sense, striving towards environmental sustainability is necessary for psychological self-preservation and restoration. Environmental activism-as-cognitive therapy. Applied to sport, the notion of sustainability has a number of interesting elements. The body struggles to sustain effort over the course of a race, bout, or contest, the mind sustains focus and attention in order to achieve peak performance, and exercisers sustain (of fail to sustain) a practice of regular physical exertion. As we approach Earth Day in the next week or so, what do we make of sport, the body, the environment, and sustainability? In what ways do modern physical cultures contribute to or detract from "green" politics and practices? In what ways have we built or altered environments to sustain our sport and fitness endeavors while simultaneously damaging natural settings? Drawing from ecopsychology, what does it mean that we sometimes condone environmental degradation in the pursuit of our sport and exercise interests? Further, what do we make of the cyborgian identity projects at the intersection of the technocultural and the ecopsychological? The interface/elemental-body/psyche...

From: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QpZD5W3phY

Willy Wonka meets Ronnie Coleman

2009-04-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

When does maintenance become performance enhancement? Why do we allow sports that damage the body and restrict the things that can help rebuild the desecrated temple? At what point does the boundary between internal health and external impact give way to the magic shake, the vitapack, the legal prohormone, the undetectable designer steroid, the off-shore internet pharmacy? Meticulous preparation, quantifiable and incremental progress, chuckling at the sick/healthy binary, the cyborg patient meanders across the double lines of the corporeal highway...your liver just flashed you the high beams...say your prayers, and eat your vitamins. We've all got the golden ticket, folks...shipped discreetly in plain wrapping.

"Mr O" means Olympia, NOT Organic

Premonition, freewill, and addiction

2009-03-28T23:59:00.000-07:00

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
-From A. E. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young"

I've been meaning to note the death of another young wrestler, Andrew "Test" Martin a couple weeks ago. He died only a few days before his 34th birthday in his living room, apparently while eating a pizza. His death was not a "surprise" in the sense that he had known addictions, and police did release the fact that they found steroids in his place. As several people have written though, what does it mean that the "premature" death of one more in a long line of wrestlers is no longer really a surprise? And what is premature in a business where pain killers and steroids/HGH (functional enablers and aesthetic enhancers) are still relatively common? As you can see in the video below, even the wrestlers know the gig at this point. Test knew the deal, Test was addicted, Test went to rehab, Test wanted to be huge still, Test wanted to somehow transition out of the business, Test...we have no idea what Test was thinking, but Test was only 33 years old. But...Test abused things that can kill you. Please watch the video below and if you have a moment, let me know (via a comment) how you make sense of freewill within the context of addiction, even when you see the accumulation of YouTube tribute videos to guys you've wrestled, traveled with, and who were your age. Did Test die young, or did he simply pass away at the "right" age given the abuse he gave his body? Either way, pro wrestling has lost a total of 3 more guys under 50 in the past few weeks...

Gonna fly now...Hormones high now!

2009-03-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

I pity the fool who does not begin to reconceptualize the cyborg and its relevance, both in theory and practice, to aging and the body. While some scholars such as C.L Cole (1993, 1998) have articulated the boundary transgressions and false dichotomies involved in sick/healthy bodies, for instance, few cyborg scholars have applied cyborg theory (Haraway, 1985, Gray, 2001) specifically to the aging body in sport/popular culture. Remember Sly Stallone's run-in with Australian border police a couple years ago, during which he had numerous ampules of growth hormone in his possession, and his subsequent and near advocacy-level plugs for the use of HGH in the popular media? Stallone's multi-generational corporeal metamorphoses speak as a visual and epistemological exercise in the aging cyborg. What is it to see aging, and in what ways do we come to know aging? Directly? Indirectly? Via observation or experience? Objectively or Subjectively? Enthusiastically, begrudgingly, or fearfully? How do we read the aging cyborg body? With envy or disdain? With desire or dread? With intent to applaud or need to punish? Shredded Sly doesn't care. He has always playfully, perhaps forcefully, but always openly, been a cyborgian shape shifter...his trick one of temporally situated, yet perpetually looping tracks between atrophy and hypertrophy. If age is a number, the body a canvass, identity a series of projects, death inevitable, and technology an endless series of 1's and 0's, then what knows the cyborg of retirement?

62-as-illusion/reality rupture

Solitary sweatblots

2009-03-15T23:19:00.000-07:00

As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor wrote in The Ethics of Authenticity (1992), "an individual life is hard to sustain against the grain." Consider Taylor's words here in light of Albert Borgmann's (1984) notion of the device paradigm, and the idea that the driving force of modern technocultures, including the always/already conflicted yet cyborgian domain of sport, is one governed by efficiency. The device paradigm is related to Taylor's own discussion of instrumental reason, and the practice of using the most efficient means necessary to get from point A to point B. Borgmann, however, sees points of resistance in this end game of efficiency. He calls them focal practices, things we do in life that disrupt the mindless proceedings of technological existence and, often in decidedly inefficient ways, bring some sort of meaning to our lives through connections with others. The treadmill is efficient. My stride constant, my gait controlled, even as I control the speed of the belt upon which I trod. My sweat drips onto the console and leaves a white, salty residue behind. Like a Rorschach test colliding with VO2 max. Rhythmic. Steady. My legs turnover in synch with the machine's output. I am connected to the machine, and we are connected to my Ipod which connects to my ears and ultimately to my brain, which then processes the hard rock music. This leads to my fingers pressing the "faster" button, which leads to my brain imaging myself on the last lap of my best 10k, which leads to more Rorschach tests on the console...A few more beads make their way into the circuitry and then efficiency...is...dead. Malfunction. Device loses. Cyborg thinks he/it wins. No connection left. Alone. Solitary. Unplugged.

Registering Efficiency on the Borg Scale

Jonathan! Jonathan!

2009-03-01T22:54:00.000-08:00

So many sport films, so many trite storylines and predictable endings. How do people really get paid for rehashing the same thing so many times? (Insert politician joke here) So little in the way of honest critique of contemporary sport. Sure, some films let viewers observe the side-effects of high performance sporting endeavors (e.g. Any Given Sunday), but how many question the values of the entire corporate sport structure itself? How many question, directly, the viewers of violent sporting spectacles in ways that necessitate self-reflection? How many would parents make sure their kids never saw? How many are not used to psych up jacked up high school football players? More importantly, what the hell was going on in the mid 1970s that prompted the release of several films dealing with sporting violence and dystopian visions of sport's role in society? Even more importantly, where have such films gone? (ok...indie film fests aside!)

Death Race 2000 (Bartel, 1975) is perhaps known best for Sylvester Stallone's participation. However, the movie's underlying message that the mass corporate media was complicit in the creation of a violent, even murderous pseudosport event resonates today. Humans are are assigned point values, and drivers rack up points while traversing the US. Some fans even offer up their soon-to-be-corpses for the "honor" of helping the cyborg protagonist ("Frankenstein") add to his total. Empathy replaced by celebrity worship. Sport encompassed by bloodlust.

James Cann's turn as Jonathan E in Rollerball (Jewison, 1975) was visionary in many ways, although the film is rarely praised as such. Visually, what the game scenes lose in slickness, they make up for in cringe-inducing action. The (overly simplistic) notion that the corporate elite managed violent sport to show the futility of individual effort was ahead of its time, for sport films anyway. Jonathan E was allowed to be a star, but when he became bigger than the game...well, he was not supposed to be bigger than the game. No corporate idolatry allowed. The elite were the chess players, and the Rollerball players were their gorefest pawns. The fans cheered his name...and they paid their moolah. The final scene points to radical social change.

Get your hands on Death Race 2000 and Rollerball and watch them as a double feature...and then watch Sportcenter. Watch Cops. Watch 24. Watch Jackass. Watch UFC. Watch American Idol. Watch Monday Night Raw. Watch Bill O'Reilly. Watch the Oscars. Watch some muppet on your local station try to make you feel miserable about the state of the world, frantic about traffic, fearful of the oncoming storm, angry at the latest drug scandal in baseball, and then...finally happy because a local cat saved an 80 year old grandma from her rabid pet monkey. Watch it all...are you cheering for something? Are you properly medicated?

Trailer for Rollerball (1975)

Faux-Flex?

2009-02-22T21:46:00.000-08:00

Following my last post, Canadian sport sociologist Sean Smith commented on whether the English language is even equipped to deal with the ongoing attempts by the sport culture to distinguish between the "real" and "fake," or any other false binaries for that matter. Does the "in-betweeness elude language and its fixity?" is what he wrote. I thought about this last night as I watched Pumping Iron for the 3rd time. Yes, the California economic system has a major hernia so I felt like watching Governor Arnold's campy portrayal of himself. Tonight I watched footage of the 2008 Mr. Olympia, and I again struggled with Sean's question. What do we make of a sport (some might debate this label, but I do not) that is predicated on the "unnatural"? Again, the language cannot help us...if all elite sport is by definition outside the norm, and the athletes themselves lie on the outer reaches of the standard deviations of performance, physical abilities, and perhaps substance intake, then bodybuilding is what...SUPERunnatural? HYPERunnatural? Of course there are "natural" bodybuilding competitions, but they are not what they claim to be either. The term "natural" seems to fail in any use within the sporting domain, because virtually all sporting competitions require some sort of effort above and beyond what one would be doing otherwise. To engage in a training regimen is, in this sense, unnatural. Check out the IOC's definition of doping and let me know what you think...it is very interesting how they phrase it. I think their language fails, too. If we dump the natural-artificial distinction, then how do we discuss the infinite possibilities of cyborg boundary transgressions? Why not step into a post-lexicon landscape where we outright refuse to use anachronistic language to talk about anachronistic ways of thinking about bodies and identities? What are we so afraid of?

2008 Mr. Olympia (Jackson & Cutler)

All apologies

2009-02-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

"What else should I be
All apologies"

So sang the late Kurt Cobain. Apologies are in vogue lately, particularly by athletes seeking atonement for the seemingly mortal sin of self-cyborgification via performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). Dramatic apologies, half-hearted apologies, and mostly vague admissions of some indiscretion. No less than a half dozen cyclists in the 2009 Tour of California cycling race are "ex-dopers" in search of redemption. Some have no such crusade because...well, they were never caught in the first place. Alex Rodriguez, inhabitant of that den of purity known as major league baseball, is the latest protagonist in the now tiresome saga of so-called "steroid scandals." Melodrama. Like plasma through a syringe, these are the Days of our Dopers. Sanctimonious rhetoric. A website called dontbeanasterisk.com claims that the * signifies "being a fake." In A-Rod's case, dating Madonna is at least as big of an * as taking steroids, or what he now refers to as an "amateur hour" injection procedure. The Material Girl aside, though, what is material here is the ongoing use of loaded terms, such as "fake" and "real," that are problematic in the cyborg era of sport where athletes are far from gobs of stem-cell potential absent of any chemical, procedure, or practice meant to improve performance. If Lance Armstrong's babies can be (accurately) described as products of modern scientific medicine, then I am fine with A-Rod with or without the *. What we might consider is our framing of elite sport as anything other than fake in the first place. A manufactured, corporatized entertainment endeavor that, underneath the veneer of good old fashioned competition, is as much like American Idol as anything, in that it pretends to be something it is not. Here we are now, entertain us.

FYI: We'll address the "harm to the kids" argument at another time...

Promises, Promises...

2009-01-31T22:56:00.000-08:00

MMA lightweight champ BJ Penn is a brilliant competitor, but he was outmatched by GSP tonight. My main concern, or irritation however, involves the rhetoric over the past several weeks. In the promos leading up to the fight, Penn uttered that trite phrase we have heard many times before: "Till the death!" Runners will put one blistered foot in front of the other until they collapse, soccer players will head themselves into concussive bliss, and fighters will weeble-wobble on to the after parties...but they seldom follow through with this "until I die" thing. I have run until I vomited a few times, but I don't remember ever tempting fate by promising to continue until death was upon me. Sport has its Shakespearean tragedies, for sure, but what's with the false advertising? Someone should do a content analysis (Fatal rhetoric: A study of deathtalk in sport) on the throwing down of the "till the death" verbal gauntlet. Show me the data on how many athletes we lose per thousand proclamations to fight until Charon hauls their ass over the river Styx. If it is not a significant number, we should prompt athletes to find a more accurate and honest way of expressing their collective desire to do battle until they either win, or take a full time job pushing up daisies.

Scrambled Synapses and Super Bowls

2009-01-27T22:08:00.000-08:00

I read this article on "dead athletes' brains" today and thought about a phrase my friend and colleague Larry deGaris always says: "For what, Ted? For what?" The article talks with a fairly well-known former WWE wrestler named Chris Nowinski, who was actually a Harvard graduate. He was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome, and in recent years has been on a crusade of sorts to educate people, including the higher-ups in the various pro leagues, about the dangers of sustaining multiple concusions. Dead men or women may tell no tales, but their brains tell many stories, it turns out. Nowinski was instrumental in getting the family of the late wrestler Chris Benoit, who murdered his wife and young son, and then hung himself with his own weight lifting machine, to donate Benoit's brain for study. As expected, it showed pretty significant damage following years of unprotected chair shots to the head, not to mention thousands of other "bumps" in and out of the ring. Given the elite ethos of sport that has filtered down to the high school, and even youth level, I wonder at what age will the brains of young football players, soccer players, and other contact sport athletes begin their prologues...their own tales? This is not a call for some paternalistic move towards "softening" sport, in any way, but isn't one purpose of good research to help society make better decisions? Sport media outlets talk about "bulletin board material" a lot leading up to sporting contests like this Sunday's football game. Instead of stapling a quote from an opposing player on the board to psych up a team (itself an overly simplistic and mechanistic attempt at motivation and arousal manipulation), I wonder how many coaches would dare hang summaries of the concussion research in the locker room? I wonder how many players would read it? We love our sport heroes sunny side up. Perhaps we should get used to having them scrambled. "For what?"

Here is the link: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/01/26/athlete.brains/index.html

Reality/Illusion, Violence, and the Grotesque

2009-01-25T20:41:00.000-08:00

Given the choice to be a spectator at one event, would you prefer your “violence” in the form of a “legitimate” sport or as a form of physical theatre? As philosopher David Best noted in his 1978 essay, “The aesthetic in sport,” the notion of an aesthetic athlete or sporting phenomenon can encompass both the beautiful and the ugly. Art history reveals a wealth of examples of horrific images that are meant to illustrate both beauty and the grotesque, sometimes simultaneously. Imagine a photograph of an MMA athlete executing a perfect arm bar on her opponent, the image clearly capturing the extended arm an instant before the pressure causes the elbow to pop out of place, or the arm bone to visibly snap. The image itself conveys precision, efficiency, and a potential for grotesque bone and ligament contortions if the opponent does not tap. Imagine another photograph, a close-up of the face of a pro wrestler emerging from the mat, having used a razor blade to draw blood and, in theory, add dramatic effect in the match. The self-as-canvass. In this case the camera intentionally misses the act itself, thus preserving the illusion that a fist or chair, not the practice of “blading,” caused the steady flow of plasma that signifies “reality” to the audience. Viewing the grotesque can illicit feelings of empathy or disgust. Grotesque acts of violence, whether by one athlete against another, or by one performer against himself, ultimately need not be. Yet, the foreshadowing of violence and the visual aftereffects of violence are important to the phenomenology of the aesthetic in MMA and wrestling. I watched both this weekend, and I am still not sure which I prefer, or whether I should even be watching them at all.

Diving into the cyber-maelstrom!

2009-01-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

Hey all,

I'm Dr. Ted, logging in from my humble office at San Jose State University, and this is my new project for 2009! Check in every week or two for a healthy collision between sport and popular culture. Commentary, theory, questions, and rants...they will all find their way into this thing. We'll talk cyborg athletes, pro wrestling and MMA, media and sport, identity politics, and much more. The tone will be academic, serious, playful, and even irreverent at times, depending on where I'm at! Until then, check out the film The Wrestler and see what you think...aside from the fact that Mickey Rourke's 50-something year-old head was attached to a body that looked like it had some help from a "supplement."