Abandoning The Performance Narrative: Two Women's Stories of Transition from Professional Sport

Abstract

Despite its potential to illuminate psychological processes within socio-cultural contexts, examples of narrative research are rare in sport psychology. In this study, we employed an analysis of narrative to explore two women's stories of living in, and withdrawing from, professional tournament golf gathered through life history interviews conducted over 6 years. Our findings suggest that immersion in elite sport culture shaped these women's identities around performance values of single-minded dedication to sport and prioritization of winning above all other areas of life. When the performance narrative ceased to “fit” their changing lives, both women, having no alternative narrative to guide their personal life stories, experienced narrative wreckage and considerable personal trauma. They required asylum—a place of refuge where performance values were no longer paramount—to story their lives around a relational narrative that reinstated a coherent identity while providing meaning and worth to life after golf.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We offer our sincere thanks to Berni and Debbie for sharing with us stories of their lives. We also thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this article and thank UK Sport for funding the research that took part in 2005/6.

Notes

The terms “narrative” and “story” are used interchangeably by some authors. While acknowledging this ambiguity, we follow Frank (1995) in using “story when referring to actual tales that people tell and narrative when discussing general structures that comprise particular stories” (p. 188).