Politics “out of place”? Making sense of conflict in sport spaces

Abstract

Despite their relevance to the function of sport and social relations, the spaces produced in and through sport practices and performances remain under-examined. Consequently, there is little engagement with the logics that are employed in sport spaces or with the shape and material form that such logics take in sport spaces. Likewise, there is only a modest sense of how social change works in and through sport space. I argue that more attention must be paid to the social spaces that are both produced through and are productive of the intersections of sport and social relations. Without this awareness, the ways in which cultural values are reproduced through game-day practices and spatialized discourses remain obscured. My discussion focuses on on-court activism of and reactions to US college basketball player Toni Smith who, in 2003, held a series of protests against the US involvement in Iraq. This case illustrates the discursive construction of sport spaces as apolitical and shows that sport space played a vital role in Smith's statement of dissent.

En dépit de leurs pertinences, la fonction politique des espaces sportifs demeure sous-étudiée. Par conséquent, nous n'avons peux de connaissance vis-à-vis l'engagement politique est les espaces sportifs. De même, il existe seulement une considération modeste pour la façon dont les changements sociaux et manifesté ou contesté dans ces espaces sportifs. Je soutiens que plus d'attention doit être accordée à l'intersection du sport et la politique. Sans cette prise de conscience, les façons dont les valeurs culturelles sont reproduites à travers l'entraînement et les matchs restent obscures. Ma discussion se concentre sur l'activisme d'un joueur de basketball collégien Toni Smith qui en 2003, a tenu une série de manifestations politique contre l'intervention américaine en Irak. Cette étude de cas illustre comment les espaces sportifs sont considéré comme lieux laïques et démontre que l'espace sportif peut joué un rôle important dans la politique américaine.

Keywords:

• socio-spatial
• space
• politics
• sport
• Toni Smith

Mots-clés:

• socio spatiale
• espace
• politique
• sport
• Toni Smith

Acknowledgement

The author benefited from the constructive comments of the editors of this special issue, Eileen Muller Myrdahl, Karen Till, and two anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. Although Bélanger (2000), Silk (2004), Silk and Amis (2005), Wilcox, Andrews, Pitter, and Irwin (2003) and Zhang and Silk (2006), for example, provide a vital complement in their analyses of the normative cultural politics that inform the relationship between sport and the built environment in the revanchist city, their attention is less directed at the social spaces within sites of sport.

2. I am thoughtful of Hartmann's (2000, p. 241) observation about the dangers of generalizing about sport (see also Andrews & Giardina, 2008; Bourdieu, 1988; McAloon, 1988; Whannel, 2008); as he argues, “the thing we call sport is a large and complex social institution with a wide variety of forms and racial functions.” Although Hartmann's argument focused on the functions and articulations of race within American sport, his point is relevant here: the context and particularities of sport matter to the development of a cogent spatial analysis. Keeping this in mind, I maintain that a socio-spatial lens can deepen our understanding of events and issues related to any given sport.

3. The ‘Kiss Cam’ is a common practice at US professional sport events. A camera person scans the audience, zooms in on a (heterosexual) couple, often overlaying the image with a cartoon-like heart and remains focused on the couple until they kiss. Wise (2009) describes the practice: [the team or arena management] “send[s] their video cameramen and camerawomen to find unsuspecting couples in the stands during timeouts and capture[s] their [faces] for all of Verizon Center's crowd to see … [then] wait[s] for the couple's reaction, which usually involves a polite, if awkward, peck on the lips” (para. 2).