Drinking, downfall and redemption: biographies and ‘athlete addicts’

Abstract

Accounts of drinking and drunken misadventures often feature in narratives surrounding sporting celebrities. Often framed as a ‘fall from grace’, such accounts tend to paint the athlete as a ‘fool or villain’. For some sportsmen and women, their fall from grace represents a high-profile, public display of a more insidious, problematic relationship with drugs and alcohol rather than a scandalous transgression of moral values as more typically cast. Drawing on four (auto)biographies that recount the story of an athlete’s struggle with alcohol addiction, this article examines some of the narratives of alcoholism among professional athletes, particularly their decline, recovery and, in some cases, their death. Employing the ‘restitution narrative’ common in the sociology of health and illness to shape particular relationships between an individual and their illness, the article highlights some of the contradictory themes that run through narratives of addiction in professional sport which, for some athletes, are the ‘hidden’ aspect of their life as a sporting celebrity. While sport may have a rich tradition of famous drinkers, their behaviours – and how the story around these behaviours is recounted and remembered – have not yet been researched in a systematic, theoretically informed analysis that can add to our understandings of the contemporary sporting celebrity.

KEYWORDS:

• sporting celebrities
• biographies
• alcohol
• addiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are, of course, individuals who Jackson and Andrews describe as ‘accidental celebrities’; that is, ‘sporting celebrities [such as Caster Semenya, the female South African 800 metres runner who was subject to “gender verification testing” following her victory in the 2009 World Championships] who are propelled into the spotlight by scandal instead of their phenomenal physical performances’ (2012, p. 266). These, however, are beyond the scope of this article, with its focus on narrative building and the discursive management of a sporting celebrity’s select life.

2. Most people who use ‘potentially addicting substances do not become addicts, but between 15% and 17% do’ (Morse 2011, p. 176).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Catherine Palmer

Catherine Palmer is Head of School and Professor, School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania. Catherine’s research principally involves qualitative and ethnographic methods to explore aspects of sport and social policy, and she has published research on sport and alcohol, the commercialisation of risk in adventure tourism and lifestyle sports, sport and newly arrived refugee communities, and the Tour de France. She is currently working on a new research project exploring the idea of ‘Fitness Philanthropy’, the growth of charity sporting events and broader discourses of illness, health and well-being.