what isn't broken just isn't broken yet

something about the ephemeral nature of athletic divinity

[teamloyalty]

reading list and tags (sports & theory themed)

[all sport-themed reflective writing is tagged #sports meta] [all of my original posts are tagged #my post] [all excerpts from the reading list are tagged #currently reading] [more specific reading lists are tagged #reading list]

Queerness and masculinity in sport [tag: #queerness in sport] [tag: #masculinity in sport]

David Fleming, "Nothing to See Here: A history of showers in sports" in ESPN The Magazine (July 8, 2014) [link]

Rory Magrath and Eric Anderson, "Football, homosexuality and the English Premier League: A changing cultural relationship" in The English Premier League: A Socio-Cultural Analysis, edited by Richard Elliot (2017)

Michael Messner, Power at Play: Sport and the Problem of Masculinity (1992) [link]

Michael Messner and Donald F. Sabo (eds.), Sport, Men, and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives (1990) [link]

Brian Pronger, The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (1991) [tag: #Brian Pronger] [tag: #The Arena of Masculinity]

Don Sabo and Sue Curry Jansen, “Prometheus Unbound: Constructions of Masculinity in the Sports Media,” (1998)

Ocean Vuong, "Reimagining Masculinity" in The Paris Review (June 10, 2019) [link]

Women and Sport [tags: #misogyny in sport (catch-all tag) ; #female athletes ; #wives and girlfriends]

Rita Bullwinkel, Headshot: A Novel (2024) [link]

Steven Ortiz, The Sports Marriage: Women Who Make It Work (2020) [tag: #Steven Ortiz] [tag: #The Sports Marriage]

John M. Sloop, "Riding in Cars Between Men," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (September 2005) [link] [tag: #John Sloop] [tag: #Riding in Cars Between Men]

Motorsport 🏎️ [tag: #motorsport (catch-all tag) ; #women in motosport ; #men and cars]

Women in Motorsport Reading List

Tim Dant, "The Driver-car," Theory, Culture & Society 21: no. 4/5 (2004) [link]

Honorata Jakubowska, "The Awkward Gender Politics of Formula 1 as a Promotional Space: The Issue of 'Grid Girls,'" in The History and Politics of Motor Racing (2023) [link] [tag: #Honorata Jakubowska] [tag: #The Awkward Gender Politics of Formula 1 as a Promotional Space]

Elizabeth Lick, Rashid Bakirov, and Tauheed Ahmad Ramjaun, "Female motorsport fan engagement on social media-based brand communities," Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing 12, no. 1 (2024) [link]

Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, "Something Less than a Driver: Toward an Understanding of Gendered Bodies in Motorsport," Journal of Sport and Social Issues 33, no. 4 (2009) [link] [tag: #Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder] [tag: #Something Less than a Driver]

Sarah Redshaw, “Articulations of the Car: The Dominant Articulations of Racing and Rally Driving,” Mobilities 2, no. 1 (2007) [link]

John M. Sloop, "Riding in Cars Between Men," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2, no. 3 (September 2005) [link] [tag: #John Sloop] [tag: #Riding in Cars Between Men]

Football ⚽ [tag: #football]

Michael Calvin, No Hunger in Paradise: The Players, the Journey, the Dream (2017)

Nick Hornby, Fever Pitch: A Fan's Life (1992) [link] [tag: #Nick Hornby] [tag: #Fever Pitch]

Michael Park and Kyungmook Lee, "Liability of High Status: Overpayment to Relieve Status Anxiety in the English Premier League," Seoul Journal of Business 27, no. 1 (June 2021).

General sport-related writing [tag: #sports meta][tag: #sports fandom]

Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension (2024) ☑️ [tag: #hanif abdurraqib] [tag: #there's always this year: on basketball and ascension]

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In Praise of Athletic Beauty (2006) [link] [tag: #hans ulrich gumbrecht] [tag: #in praise of athletic beauty]

Adam Kadlac, The Ethics of Sports Fandom (2021) [tag: #adam kadlac] [tag: #the ethics of sports fandom]

David Foster Wallace, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," in The New York Times (August 20, 2006) [original NYT link] [link without paywall]

[brawngp2009]

LONDON, ENGLAND - JUNE 13: Andy Murray of Great Britain has blood on his hand during the men's semi final match against Juan Carlos Ferrero of Spain during Day 6 of the the AEGON Championship at Queens Club on June 13, 2009 in London, England. (Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

[femalegothic]

men just love to run their fucking mouth about what women do or do not want without even once considering consulting any actual women on the matter

How Women’s Sports Uniforms Became So Controversial, Long Before The Paris Olympics

Nike’s viral track kit is just one part of the story.

Faced with restrictive and uncomfortable uniforms, these women athletes fought to change their gear

(cnn) — When Olympian Tess Howard put on her new uniform for Great Britain’s women’s field hockey team in 2021, she

Women’s beach handball team fined for choosing shorts over bikini bottoms | CNN

The Norwegian women’s beach handball team has been fined after players opted to wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms during a European cham

Top female athletes speak out amid Olympics, defy convention through their uniforms

Female athletes are breaking with their sports' apparel conventions -- if not regulations -- to prioritize their comfort during competitions

Women’s Uniforms: judgement of women clutters sports front

Sports Commentary Historically, women in sports have not garnered the same respect as men, though they perform the same tasks and play the s

An Olympic medalist who refused to compete in bikini bottoms says skimpy outfits are putting women off athletics

Pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw refused to wear the customary bikini bottoms and crop tops favored by the majority of female athletes.

Underlying Injustices: Female Athlete Uniforms

According to Women in Sport, 78 percent of girls avoid participating in sports while on their period. 78 percent.  CEO of Women in Sport, St

[marzipanandminutiae]

also this is part of a disturbing but sadly not uncommon attitude that progress = women (specifically women most of the time) showing more skin. because not showing skin is "following irrational religious modesty mandates" like the man on twitter says

somehow being progressive and secular automatically means putting women's bodies on display (although of course these people would shame women showing that much skin because they chose to). gee, I wonder why...

(to be clear, religious concealing clothing should also be respected as long as it's voluntary!)

[thefootballarchivist]

May 1963: A prone BBC cameraman films through the goal during the European Cup final between Benfica and AC Milan.

[fvanhout]

Tennis Court

[blans]

Belgium versus Iran, World Cup 2026 — photographed by Kohjiro Kinno

[coachspet]

join the hockey studies group on zotero!

per my post a couple days ago, i have created a group on zotero for sharing hockey-related articles!

the group library is accessible to all, you don’t need to join to browse it or open the PDFs attached to each file (but please do just because it’d be fun). if you already have a zotero account i advise you to get rid of any identifying information in it unless you’re cool tying your fandom activity to your real life name.

how to read an article: select it > open “attachments” in the right sidebar > you’ll see the attachment > click open!

to avoid spam/griefing (neither of which i think my beloved oomfs would do, but you know how it is), i’ve made it so only admins (me) can add items to the library. but i want you to help me curate this! you can submit articles to be added by messaging me with a link to the article + a PDF (i do not care how you acquire this PDF, don’t worry about that, i love piracy), or you can email it to [email protected] if that’s easier.

i’m not going to be vetoing articles by like, journal impact or anything. just send in whatever you might find interesting! whether it’s about youth hockey culture, injuries or even ice surface quality, it has a spot here and i am going to cherish it.

some articles (one so far) may contain graphic imagery. those are tagged with a red-coloured label so you can know what you’re in for. i tag everything manually so i apologise if i miss anything! you can also message me about that if you’d like.

please join my group it would be very cool to have all of you there.

[inhalingstardust000]

WEARING CARS || ‘‘When she puts that helmet on and climbs into her race car you can’t tell if she’s a man or a woman — she’s just a race driver’.’

A Cyborg Manifesto || Something Less than a Driver || Riding in Cars Between Men || History of female F1 drivers || Lella Lombardi || Divina Galica || Desiré Wilson || Beyond the Grid: Women and the Misconceptions in the F1 Community || Susie Wolff || Doriane Pin || Jamie Chadwick ||

[noodlesinbroth]

Gabriella Papadakis and Madison Hubbell photographed by Joel Hunn at Art on Ice. The two performed as a “historic female duet”, challenging traditions and and gender stereotypes in the figure skating world

Source: joel.hunn on Instagram

[allthespoons]

imo the book for understanding sexual/sexualized violence in men's hockey is crossing the line by laura robinson

[allthespoons]

if someone asked me for recs to understand hockey culture i would say these, in the following order:

crossing the line by laura robinson

the jenner & block report on the sexual assault against kyle beach when he was a blackhawk (available here) and then mark lazarus' reporting about it

john branch's reporting on derek boogard (either the original series, punched out, or his book boy on ice)

the boys from brampton podcast (episode available here)

rick westhead's reporting on the 2018 wjc sexual assault (his book we were lions is serviceable but i don't think it's essential)

the sport marriage by steven m. ortiz (which i think originally i saw recced by @bliksemflitsenblog)

everything that @whirlpool-blogs has archived about the usntdp

the personal life and controversies sections of the wikipedia pages of the most famous and beloved players from your favorite team

[teamloyalty]

hi! I've been enjoying going through the links in your reading list, and was wondering if you could share where you were able to read Adam Kadlac, The Ethics of Sports Fandom (I was not able to find it near me 😅)

i saw you were able to locate a copy! if i can, i try to link the digital copy of the works i reference, and collect them on this google drive - looks like i put the pdf of kadlac's book in the drive but forgot to link it on the post! sorry about that. for anyone still looking, you can find that here :)

[leguin]

helen, do you know things about hockey? i've been trawling reddit and asking people and trying to get a sense of what the culture is like generally and what the nhl is really like about gay people bc i don't know anything and i'm very curious, and the more people say the less i feel i know

i do! i watched it very actively for about 5 years (2013-2018ish) and went to games until 2022/23, and still keep up with a few players who i'm fond of. i would say that the nhl is pretty weird about gay people, in some expected 'major sports league' ways but also in some very men's hockey-specific ways (in my opinion, anyway - the nhl is the only major sports league i've ever paid very close attention to, so this could be off-base). some thoughts below:

the big thing is that there has never been an openly gay nhl player, active or retired (luke prokop is an out player who was drafted a few years ago but he has not played an actual nhl game and probably never will). the line for a while was that there were no gay hockey players at all, which is why no one had come out (statistically obviously unlikely, also absurd). since the early 2010s it's been a Known thing that there are gay players but they aren't coming out For Some Reason. if you're curious, it's worth reading this 2015 article about an organization that the nhl partners with called You Can Play, which encourages inclusion and acceptance in hockey, etc etc.

a relevant excerpt from the interview:

Then, Burke said, there's the question of hockey culture itself. "Hockey is all about the team. Hockey culture hates individualism," said Burke. "Whether that's right or wrong, hockey culture is that you do not stand out. You do not make yourself different from the team. We've had players in our league that have been yelled at for high-fiving too aggressively. So I do wonder from talking to a bunch of different players in the league that this is a team sport and almost an obsessively team culture and I think there are guys out there that are nervous about the idea that them coming out would somehow be going against that."

burke's not exaggerating here, there's a huge emphasis on conformity in hockey culture that's also extremely tied up in the idea that the Ideal Hockey Player is a "good [white] canadian boy" who doesn't stand out or rock the boat in any serious way, especially not politically. a small but notable example would be michel therrien, a horrible person and former coach of the montreal canadiens, banning a specific handshake/high-five that two of his players used to do (pk subban and carey price; notably neither of them are white). therrien later justified the ban by saying

"...we had to change the culture of the team. We wanted to remove the individualistic side of each player and institute a collective concept.""

anyway, at this point the official party line of the nhl and most players is that they would be fine with a gay teammate, and it's entirely possible there are guys who are out to some degree to their teams, but who knows. i don't think any of this is particularly shocking for men's sports in north america, although there are some levels of racism and xenophobia, and things like the billet system, that maybe add some more dimensions to it than you might see in e.g. major league baseball, idk.

where it gets weirder and messier is on the topic of how the nhl feels about gay fans. the thing that made me stop buying tickets and going to games was the league announcing, in 2023, that they were banning all 'theme night' jerseys and on-ice displays related to "special initiatives", including the use of pride tape (rainbow-colored hockey stick tape) because a very small number of players (about 5 of the 900 active players) had not wanted to wear themed jerseys on pride night during the 22-23 season. for context, every team in the league hosted a pride night at the time, along with many other theme nights (hockey fights cancer, military nights, etc etc). theme nights have special jerseys that are usually auctioned off after the night with proceeds going to specific charities - worth noting the jerseys aren't worn during games, just warm-ups, so for about 20-30 minutes total. that's it!

that banning jerseys and "displays" was the league's answer to not liking the bad publicity james reimer & co gave them by being too homophobic to spend 20 minutes wearing a jersey with a rainbow on it is wild, but what was really bizarre was the weasel-y, ambiguous way they framed it in a league-wide memo:

"Players shall not be put in the position of having to demonstrate (or where they may be appearing to demonstrate) personal support for any Special Initiatives. A factor that may be considered in this regard includes, for example, whether a Player (or Players) is required to be in close proximity to any groups or individuals visibly or otherwise clearly associated with such Special Initiative(s)."

when the "special initiative" you're concerned about is lgbt pride, one begins to wonder what exactly "close proximity to individuals visibly or otherwise clearly associated with" pride might mean! the nhl ended up clarifying/walking back some of the memo, and unbanning the use of pride tape after a player used it anyway (i guess fining or suspending him for that would have been even worse publicity), but clearly not because they have any integrity or moral clarity. the overwhelming impression i and many other people got from this whole situation was that the league was ready and willing to throw even the most nominal moves towards inclusion under the bus when it was deemed a distraction. not shocking that a sports league would prioritize finances over anything else, but it did make me completely unwilling to spend ~700 dollars a year on hockey tickets.

after 2023 i pretty much stopped following most nhl news, so i don't know if the league has improved in any way, but given the current political climate i doubt it. my impression of the nhl over a decade of following it very closely is that they have managed to be on the wrong side of most social issues - not in the name of open bigotry, but because taking a specific political stance would be 'distracting' from the sport of hockey. officially, Hockey is For Everyone. unofficially, they have made it very clear that welcoming queer fans to the sport is not worth any trouble whatsoever.

[broresteia]

notes app sports!

[teamloyalty]

Bruckner wasn’t bad even though he got down on his knees and proclaimed Wagner the master. saddens me, I guess, in a small way because while Wagner was hitting all those homers Bruckner was sacrificing the runners to second and he knew it. and I know that mixing baseball metaphors with classical music will not please the purists either. prefer Ruth to most of his teammates but I appreciate those others who did the best they could and kept on doing it even when they knew they were second best. this is your club fighter your back-up quarterback the unknown jock who sometimes brings one in at 40-to-one. this was Bruckner. there are times when we should remember the strange courage of the second-rate who refuse to quit when the nights are black and long and sleepless and the days are without end.

"Bruckner (2)", Charles Bukowski

[catullus101]

Christopher Bursk, Ovid at Fifteen, 2003

[boykeats]

[ID: poem text reading,

“Ganymede? Hyacinth? How does a boy explain to his teammates he longs to be so dazzling a god couldn’t resist him? How does he tell his coach he’d like to be ethereal, a gold-fringed bird with no obligations except to wake the world?”

/end ID]

[thebeautiful-game-blog]

[walk-up-songs]

What about something involving rain delays?

I am once again posting poetry on public transit