Ep 2 -- Ch 1 - The Sociology of Sports

This is the Sports and Society Podcast, where we go beyond scores, statistics, and personalities to focus on issues and controversies in sports worlds. Your hosts, Jay Cochely and Jeff Montezdeoka, are sports sociologists and the authors of the book, Sports and Society, Issues and Controversies. The episodes in this podcast give you a behind the scenes look at the textbook, with stories from our lives, the scholars, and athletes, as well as providing analysis of ongoing issues and controversies in contemporary sport worlds. We welcome hearing your thoughts and analysis, so please use this space to engage with us about the textbook or any of the topics we cover in this podcast. Welcome to another episode of Sports and Society Podcast, Jay, how are you doing today? Pretty good, Jeff, and you're looking good at how are you doing? Oh, I'm doing great, thank you, Jay. So this is going to be our first episode that focuses on a specific chapter. We're going to be talking through chapter one of the book, Sports and Society. And the way I thought maybe we should begin this episode is, Jay, maybe we can just take a moment to talk about what is sport. And I think this is really important because we've all grown up around sports. We sort of intuitively know what sports are, but once you start actually thinking about like a definition of sport, it gets really complicated. It does. And it's a great question because what counts as sport is oftentimes a contested issue and people with power and influence are oftentimes those who define what counts as sport in an official sense. But when we think about a definition, generally people want to include competition in that definition, but that raises some issues. What about challenges that don't involve a direct competition with another person or with another team, like mountain climbing, for example, or rock climbing. And when you're doing that as part of a group, and you certainly think you're doing sport, but it's not competition, it's a challenge and that's a little bit different. So the other thing that people include in most definitions is it has to be physical. And for the most part, most of us in sports as theology would agree with that. But when I went to the Soviet Union back in 1980, right before the Olympic Games that they sponsored, I went to their training center. And the first thing I saw when I walked in were all of these soundproof booths and telephones and chess boards because their Olympic committee considered chess to be a sport. And they sponsored chess players as athletes in the same way. So basically the definition is a political thing and it's generally influenced by the people who have power and control in connection with sport organizations. Well that's great because what you're talking about is sport as an institution, but also how different institutions come together to define something as sport at any given time or place. Let's think about that in the sense of all right, there are certain things we just know are sports, football, basketball, baseball, skiing, swimming, so on and so forth. There's all these sports, they either have professional leagues or they're in the Olympics and whatnot. And so we can accept those as sports. But then there's other things. And one of my favorite examples is the blood sports, cock fighting, cock fighting, bull fighting when people would sick dogs to kill a bull or bear baiting, same thing, but they'd kill a bear with dogs, fox hunting, all of these things that were sports when the word sport came into the English language, but we don't tend to think of them as sports anymore. Conversely, there's other things that are becoming called sports, e-sports for instance, cheerleading as a sport, increasingly student-led games such as Quidditch, you know, is Quidditch a sport? Is it not a sport? How do you answer that question Jay? Yeah, I have another example I want to just throw in there, but Laura, try to answer that. And that is there's a college in the East that just developed a Cornhole team and they've given two scholarships to the two best high school age Cornhole players in the United States. So they're going to school for free, it's a division three school, but in their athletic department they have Cornhole. So basically, a sport in terms of our taking for granted sports is an activity that has a governing body, a rule-making body that gives the activity its official character. And we take those for granted. And if we look at the connection between cultural traditions and culture in general and what counts as a sport, we can see that as culture changes, so do the kinds of things that we call sports. And your examples are classic there because as people have taken offense at dogs fighting each other or a bull being killed or a fox being shot, they're no longer considered official sports. And you know, when I grew up, there was a magazine called Sports A Field and it was like sports illustrated and it covered all those. And many people just took for granted that those things were sports. Now people have objected and the legitimacy of those activities as sports has been questioned. And that's part of what sport is all about is they change along with culture and along with the norms that exist in society. So just maybe one more question. We might have two more questions on this topic because it is complicated. And I'm thinking about like, so I love in class to ask if cheerleading is a sport or not. And students get really heated. When we have this discussion, because invariably there's somebody that would say a football or basketball player in high school like they competed and they're like, oh no cheerleading is not a sport. And invariably there's a student who was a cheerleader in high school and they argue cheerleading is absolutely a sport. And I think this gets to the politics of this definition. Why are people, why do you think people get so invested in saying something is or is in a sport? Like, if I'm a cheerleader, why would I want to demand cheerleading should be called a sport? Or if I'm a gamer, why might I demand gaming be called e-sport? What is it about that word sport that gets people so worked up? Yeah, well, first of all, when you use the word sport, you're legitimizing a particular activity as official in some way, shape, or form. And that officialness often times comes with sponsorships. It comes with a support from friends and family and community and it leads to the acquisition of status if you're a participant. And it also connects you with other people who are official participants. So that's part of what we call in sociology, an institutionalization process where something that starts out as an informal activity just between friends starts to become increasingly formalized, increasingly governed by external organizations or individuals and eventually becomes an official sport when there is an official governing body, or like in the United States, the national federations that we have for Olympic sports, or in high schools, the official high school sports. By the way, that raises an interesting issue for me. In high schools, a lot of the sports are the sports that all of the students' grandfather's played and not their grandmother's, by the way, in many cases. So the official definitions of sport came out of the experiences and preferences of men, not women. So there's a gender issue connected with what counts as an official sport. And that's where we did into cheerleading a little bit. Cheerleading came out of a gender definition related to femininity where females are the emotional guideers of family members, of friends, and in the case of cheerleading crowds. They kind of emotionally guide a crowd through a game. Now, is that a sport? Well, it's not competitive, so I'll tell you what. Let's create cheer instead of cheerleading and we'll make it competitive. And it's certainly physical and it certainly is demanding in terms of skills. And by the way, it has an injury rate that rivals football for boys in high school. And the injuries are oftentimes really serious. So this is a physical competitive activity, cheer. And it's becoming increasingly popular in the United States at least. It hasn't made its way too much to other parts of the world where gymnastics is grounded in their cultural traditions in a way that cheer and cheerleading has been grounded in the traditions of the United States. Yeah, and that's such a great point. And cheerleading is so interesting in this regard that, and I don't know that other countries have a history of cheerleading the way we do in the United States. And one of the things that people don't realize is originally cheerleaders were all men. But sport was so sex segregated that there wasn't space for women. My recollection of the history is Southern colleges in the US south started having female cheerleaders in the 1920s. By the 1940s and 1950s, all schools had, or I should say, female cheerleaders were common across the country. But when you read through the early issues of sports illustrated, there's a lot of cartoons in there. And cartoons, right? They express the sentiments, the anxieties of a particular time. And there were a lot of cartoons about cheerleaders being present within the masculine space of football and how disruptive their sexuality is in that space. And so we can see, as recently as the 1950s, people were trying to work out anxieties around women being in this, what had been a very homosocial, highly segregated sporting space. And so these things, they change over time. For me, I think the claiming of sport is tied to the way that our dominant sports have been commercialized. And when you start making claims about this activity as a sport, it allows you access to that, those institutions, and there's a commercial model that you can then tap into. And that's really interesting when you look at the history of cheerleading, because initially, like you say, it was men in their university sweater and the logo on their sweater, doing the cheerleading. And then when women entered, a lot of people saw them as invaders of this male space. And for them to become legitimized within that space, they had to take on the characteristics of femininity as it was defined. And we can see that just in the uniforms that cheerleaders wear, and especially in professional football, and in the NFL, where the cheerleader uniforms now are exposed to bodies of the women who are cheering. And so in other words, in order to be legitimate in that space, the women had to conform with traditional norms related to femininity. It's almost like when women started playing tackle football, they, in order to get attention and some legitimacy, they started a lingerie league. And they played in lingerie with shoulder pads and helmets. And in order to attract attention, because if they had dressed just like men do in football, they would have been ignored or defined as invaders and excluded in some kind of assertive way. When they're out there in bras and panties with with shoulder pads on and a helmet on, they were defined as legitimate in kind of a crazy way. And that's what's happened to a lesser degree with cheerleading. If you're going to be in space, in a male space as a woman, you better start looking like a woman. Yeah, I don't want to get started on the lingerie league. I actually spent some time researching that and then the Foxy Boxing. One of the things that's really fascinating and I want to bring it back to where we started. I always point this out to, so it's a great point, the way in which cheerleading needed to be gendered, given the culture from the 1920s through the 1950s when modern cheerleading was defined as I highly had a heterosexual feminine aesthetic. Now it's interesting when my students make the argument, oh no, cheerleading absolutely is a sport. They're making a claim to a masculine model. They're trying to masculine eyes cheerleading by saying it is about, yes, when we're cheering for the footballer basketball team, it's not a sport. But when we're at a competition, it is a sport because we're not being supportive on the sidelines, we're at the center and we're being aggressive. So we've spent a long time talking through like just what is sport, right? And this is just the very beginning. Maybe we can connect this to what the textbook is about, which is the sociology of sport. And what is it about the sociology of sport that would lead us to spend so much time just talking about something that most people think is really simple and obvious? What is sport? Yeah, well, sport is definitely a social activity and what is defined as sport oftentimes varies from one culture to another. And so in other words, sport occurs in a social and cultural context. And that's what the sociology of sport is all about. They look at the connection between various kinds of movement and physical activities and the culture and society within which they occur and how the definitions of sport and the meanings given to those activities are all tied with what's going on in the culture at a particular point in time. So you know, getting back to our past points is that sports in the United States were created by and for men. And so there was this model of what counted as a sport that systematically excluded women. And it took the better part of a century for women to be intentionally and graciously and enthusiastically embraced as athletes in particular kinds of activities. But those activities were all based pretty much on the original models created by and for men. So that put females, girls and women at a disadvantage when it came to certain kinds of acceptance as athletes. So you got acceptance when you played like a man. And I remember in Colorado Springs when I was hanging out with the swimmers and divers there, the best compliment a woman could could get as a diver was you're diving like a man. And so in other words, you had to move away from femininity in order to be identified as an athlete, but there was a catch 22 there. If you moved too far away, then your sexuality was questioned. So then women had to adopt what we call the female apologetic. They started thinking about makeup before they went out on the field. They wanted to present themselves physically in conformity with traditional norms, gender norms related to femininity. So in order for women to be accepted, they had to make compromises in terms of how they became involved in sport and gradually those compromises are starting to be worked out. And now we have women who are actually wearing football equipment and playing football. And in fact, flag football is the fastest growing sport for young women in high school right now. So we're moving away as ideas about gender change. We're moving away from that compulsory femininity, but there still is that female apologetic. And you know, you can see it on the basketball court when young women in college have their makeup on, their hair combed just right. And oftentimes little accents to their, not to their official uniform, but to their own presentation of cell that fit within the context of definitions of femininity. We'll be coming back to this discussion of the female apologetic or the feminine apologetic in a few episodes. And we get to the chapter on gender, we have a lot to say about it then to because it's a very, it's interesting, it's complicated. And as you said, Jay, it's changing. It's not the way it was in the 1970s and 80s. But one of the things I think that's for a lot of us who do the sociology of sport that's really exciting about it is that it's both very international and it's very interdisciplinary. Now you and I both were trained in the discipline of sociology. We're both located in the United States. And so we have us pretty much a pretty strong US perspective on sport. But being in the sociology of sport, it challenges us because we have to be interdisciplinary and we have to understand sport internationally. Maybe Jay, you could talk a little bit about what makes the sociology of sport? Do you think so interdisciplinary and so inherently international? Yeah, well, on the one hand, sport sociology is interdisciplinary because life is interdisciplinary. And when you're trying to get a handle on a new topic, you know, disciplinary boundaries oftentimes get a little porous. And you know, when when I first started talking about sport and studying it from a sociological perspective, I found myself moving into social psychology, into psychology, occasionally into political science and political economy and education. So in other words, sport crossed so many disciplinary lines that in order to understand it, people had had contributions to make from different disciplines. And that's one of the things that I really find fun about the sociology of sport is that there is space for people coming from other disciplines. And sport management is the classic one right now. Parts of sport management are what I would call applied sociology. And now more and more people who are teaching in sport management programs are coming to sociology of sport conferences, their programs are the sociology of sport course in them. And they're concerned about sport as a social phenomena. And that's what you've got to do if you want to market and if you want to manage. So let me shift gears a little bit. And I think one of the hallmarks of the sociology of sport is that we look at sport through a critical lens. You know, for instance, I'll oftentimes say sports psychology is trying to build a better mouse trap. And where a sports sociology is saying, hey, it's a trap, mouse. So since 1978, when you first year, you published sports in society, you've always taken a critical approach to sports. So maybe you could talk a little bit first about what it means to study sport critically. And then also address why you think it's important that we study sport critically. Well, first of all, there's some confusion about the meaning of the word critical. And basically, critical means a couple of different things. It means that we don't take things at face value. When we see something that people accept on the basis of common sense or just take for graded as being the right way to do things, we ask questions about that. So we look under what's an easily observable veneer taken for granted by people. And we ask questions about what that activity is about, who who participates in it, for what reasons, what kinds of impact does it have on people, who's included in the activity, who's excluded from the activity, we start asking all sorts of sociological questions that raise critical issues about an activity that's taken for granted. So as researchers, we always learn to be skeptical about taken for granted things, about things in our culture and society. So we ask questions that dig into those and we try to find out what's going on in them, fully going on in terms of social relationships and in terms of who's privileged, who isn't, who's included, who's excluded, and who's in control. So those are the kinds of critical issues that we're concerned about. I mean, it really seems to me that when we talk about critical in the way you're defining this term J, is we're really applying reason to sport and other social and cultural formations so that we can understand it empirically. What are the implications it has on people's everyday lives, both positive and negative. Because a lot of times when you hear the word critical criticism, we think of it as a synonym for negative feedback. But within this, there's also a very positive vision of sport. So maybe you can also talk a little bit about how a critical approach to sport allows you to advance a positive image of sport. Yeah, that's a good question because when we use the term critical, we're not saying that we don't like sports in some kind of a general way. So you and I both grew up playing sports, we enjoyed sports, but along the way, we started asking questions about how sports were looked at within our culture, how they're organized and who participates in them. So we started asking those critical questions. It didn't mean we didn't like sport. What it meant was we wondered how the organization might be changed to make sports more humane, more accessible to a greater number of people, more participants centered, and more enjoyable for people of all ages and all backgrounds and characteristics, because we liked sports so much. So we started asking questions about how sport was organized because we wanted to make it an activity that people could participate in and have it contribute in a direct way to their own development, the relationships, and to society. So what kinds of changes have to be made to make sport that way? And that's basically one of the things that we're focusing on in the sociology of sport. We're trying to improve it in a way that makes it more inclusive and humane and accessible and enjoyable. Yeah, you know, I mean, it's funny because if you look at most of my writing, it's all very critical. And I think about why I take such a critical approach growing up, I was given a very idealistic image of maybe utopian, even image of sport about how it's good for our health physically, good for our health mentally, it's good for communities. There's all these different promises that we were given as kids, you know, regarding sport. And then as we get older and we take a more nuanced understanding of the world that we live in, we realize. There was a lot of myth there and we'll come back to the great sports myth in a few minutes. But to a certain degree, I bought into the great sports myth and I want to see it be true. And I think that's why I engage in sport so critically as a scholar because I want the promise I was given as a child to be fulfilled. And so we try to push this institution towards what we all know it could be. Exactly. And in my experience, I came to a similar place as you did in connection with all of the informal and pickup games that I played. And I've more recently called those things people's sports. They're created by and for the participants. And as I participated in those kinds of sports, I saw that they had to be, they had to be created in a way that kept the game going, kept people in the game, and so to speak. So we took the basic structure of baseball, for example, and we modified it so that when somebody who wasn't just a great hitter came up, we'd move the mound in a little bit and we'd pitch real easy so they could hit the ball. Because what are the three things that you enjoy most about baseball? It's hitting, catching and running. And so we wanted that better to hit the ball so that we could catch it and get things going on defense. So basically, those people's sports are classic forms of play. They allowed people to be spontaneous and creative, and I really valued that growing up. So when I got into organized sports, I liked organized sports, but I noticed something, some of the playfulness was disappearing, the spontaneity, the personal expression. It was all being governed now within this institutionalized structure. And so that's one of the issues that got me thinking critically about how we can make that institutionalized structure more participatory for athletes and give them opportunities to express themselves and to be spontaneous and creative. So that was part of the reason that I was asking critical questions about how sport was organized. You know, that leads into another question for me. So we were both sociologists, we both study sport critically because sociology is a critical discipline. What about people from other disciplines? Students who aren't sociology majors, and I'm thinking in particular, people say in sport management, what would you say they have to gain from studying sport in a critical way, the way that we do? Yeah, now that's a tough question in some ways, but if you're in sport management, what you want to do is you want to understand how sports are organized and how they can be governed in ways that help them grow and asking critical questions about how sport is organized is one way to find out information that would lead to changes that would stimulate growth. So that's one of the factors that people in sport management might want to be concerned about. They might also want to ask questions about whether sport is doing the developmental things that we claim that are being claimed in the great sport myth. You know, the great sport myth is basically this notion that sport is naturally pure and good, and anybody who participates in sports shares in that purity and goodness, it gets transmitted to the participants. So what happens then is that sport automatically leads to the development, the positive development of the participants and the communities that sponsor it. So if you start asking critical questions about that, what you find out is that sport may not be living up to that promise because the myth has led people to assume that certain kinds of things happen. Therefore, we don't have to study it in order to improve sport because sport is already the way it should be. And if that's the orientation that you bring in to sport management or to your own family or your own participation in the sport or your own community, you are missing opportunities for understanding, for making changes to help sport live up to that very promise that you've accepted without question. I have a very concrete example of what you're talking about, Jay. So I had a student, he was a master student here at UCCS, which is in Colorado Springs, we're known as the Olympic City, one of the US Olympic and Paralympic Training Centers is located here. And this student of minus former student, he was working for US cycling and he was a graduate student, he started a pretty low level position working for US cycling, but he could not help but take a critical perspective on the way that US cycling operates because he was getting a degree, a master's degree in sociology. And he started talking to some of the people that were running US cycling at the time. And this was when all of the sexual abuse scandal was breaking in US gymnastics, when we'll talk about that in another mode. But that turned into one of the biggest scandals in sport in US history, incredibly consequential. So he started telling the people he worked for, look, the things that we're doing is leading towards a lawsuit that we could be the next US gymnastics or the next US swimming that got themselves into an awful lot of trouble. And the people he worked for said, do you have any evidence? And he said, I don't, I don't have any collected, but I could put it together. So then he took the skills he had developed studying sociology and he applied those, you know, he talked about sport management as applied sociology, he applied those skills, both the theoretical and the methodological perspectives to US cycling and he put together a report. And long story short, it got him promoted. They wanted him to do a lot more of that and he ended up managing the velodrome at the training center there, where the cycling team trains when they're at home. He's since moved on from that, but it was incredibly important to reforming US cycling. And he brought to the people that were running, you know, US cycling, their attention, things they never saw, they never thought about. And they were grateful that he had a sociological, a critical sociological perspective. Yeah. And you've just opened up the door for a critical examination of sport from an athlete's perspective in a sense, although what's happened, what happens in sport organizations is that athletes have no power and, you know, it's the managers and the coaches who have power and the athletes are just going along with things. But once they start looking at sport as from an outside perspective, which you and I have done, as we got into sociology, we start to see things that should be noted and used and discussed and used as a basis for a considering changes. And this has happened, or it started to happen in all sorts of contexts. For example, with the Olympics, there's a lot of communities and nations that won't bid on the Olympics anymore because all of the great things that were assumed to happen as a host city for the Olympics have not been happening. Those cities have gone deep in debt. The common good wasn't promoted through the hosting of the Olympics. A lot of people were disadvantaged. They were dislocated from their homes because of the expansion of facilities and so on and so forth. We'll talk about this again in a later session. But finally, the people at the IOC are starting to understand, unless we start asking critical questions about this whole bid process and sponsorship and hosting experience, we're going to end up with nobody who wants to host the games. So because there's all sorts of problems associated with it, the Olympics didn't automatically lead to urban development. It didn't automatically lead to improvements within the nations that hosted the Olympics. So what do we have to do in order to change things so that what we assumed would happen will happen? And that's a sport management issue. And that's not only happening with the IOC. It's happening in the MCAA, it's happening in other sport organizations where they're seeing, unless we start to look at sport critically and see what's going on, it's going to fade away in the form that we're trying to maintain. So sport is an emergent phenomenon, just like any other social and cultural phenomenon. It changes over time. And if we start saying, well, sport is naturally this way and it can never change, then sport's going to become less popular. You're really touching on getting to get us back to a discussion of the great sports myth. But before we do that, one more question along the lines of critical and the word critical in the United States in recent years, there's been a lot of debate and anxiety over the term critical race theory. Maybe you can talk a little bit, Jay, about how your critical sociological perspective relates to what gets called critical race theory. Yeah, it's a really close relationship in a sense because sociology is always looking beneath common sense kinds of explanations taken for granted explanations of why things are the way they are. And as you ask those questions, you undoubtedly start wondering, why do we have the kinds of race relations that exist within our culture? Why do we have the kinds of gender relations, social class relations that exist in our country? And to answer those questions, you have to look below the surface, so to speak. You have to go back into history. You have to look at legal decisions that were made and that's where critical race theory comes from is all of the precedents that were set in legal decisions over the past 150 years in the United States that ended up creating a context, a cultural and social context that worked to the advantage of white people and to the disadvantage of black people in particular, a people for various ethnicities in general. So but when you start talking about that, you use automatically step on toes because people have gained wealth and power and status within established structures. And if you start raising questions about those structures and the norms that kind of make them work the way they do, then you're going to, you're going to get resistance. And when those people use their power and wealth, that resistance can hurt you. It's dangerous to ask critical questions under certain circumstances. In the United States, we have more freedom to do that than people in some other cultures do where nobody's asking critical questions because if you do, you're going to get jail. So critical race theory has become a hot issue because some people think that you're asking questions that are going to change the way culture and society are organized and they see that as threatening. So right now that's become an issue and those of us in sociology are coping with it. And in fact, as you and I revise this book, we have to be thinking about how can we present the research and sociology that's based on asking critical questions, the research on race and ethnicity that's based on asking critical questions, how can we discuss that in a way that's so maybe more tactful in a way that that justifies why we're looking beneath the surface to explain why things are the way they are. And we've been lucky, I've been lucky in my career to an extent because I've been able to ask those questions, although I did leave a job in 1972 for asking critical questions about gender and the Board of Regents in the State of Arizona found out about it and they wanted me gone. That's what I went to the University of Colorado and Colorado Springs. So I was going to have more freedom to ask critical questions there because I don't think you can do sociology without asking critical questions, without looking beneath the surface, without figuring out why things are the way they are. I think one of the ways that you have looked beneath the surface and been critical and it's very important in the textbook, we've already discussed it, but I want to come back to which is this idea of the great sports myth. Now let me read what you wrote. The great sports myth is you define it, sports are naturally pure and good and their purity and goodness are transferred to those who play, consumes or sponsor sports, therefore there is no need to ask critical questions about sports for the purpose of transforming them because they are already what they should be. Now I grew up, as I've already said, with this belief myself, I mean I bought into the great sports myth, so just calling it a myth feels provocative and not just to me, but also to my students, they find this term, the great sports myth, provocative, so why for you do you think it was so important to call it a myth and be provocative in that way? It took me a long time to use that word and it took a lot of negative feedback from other people. We started talking about the way sports were organized and what the data said about, if you want real social, psychosocial development to occur with athletes, then we need to change some things that are going on in sport. People have started to realize that by the way, now with mental health issues, with injuries and brain injuries in particular, they're starting to ask those critical questions, but when I asked the critical questions, I got resistance. That happened to me dozens and dozens and dozens of times, even though I presented very good research that was good methodologically, theoretically, and it came to pretty definitive kinds of conclusions and when I presented that research, people just would not believe it. And I kept thinking, what is keeping them from accepting these facts? And I started to think, well, they're believing in a myth about sport that they have taken so seriously that if they accept these facts, it's going to create cognitive dissonance for them because they're going to have two conflicting cognitive ideas in their head at the same time. And that's really unsettling. So what they did was they rejected by facts and they held on to this notion that sport is naturally pure and good and so on. So I started calling those beliefs, those sets of two beliefs that I've got in the chapter a myth. And by the way, anthropologists have used the concept of myth as they try to understand how societies and cultures are organized and myths serve purposes because they help maintain a particular structure so that things state organized in ways that benefit some people more than others and those people who are benefiting, they become the fans of the myth. They become the promoters of the myth. That helps them, they say we need a six billion dollars of public money in Brazil in order to sponsor the Olympics because the Olympics are pure and good and it's going to lead to positive forms of development for the people of Brazil, for Brazil as a country and so on. And by the way, it's going to put a lot of cash in my pocket as that six billion dollars filters through the economy so I believe the myth if I'm one of those leaders of the sport organization in Brazil and or if I'm one of the sponsors whose products are going to be promoted in connection with the Olympics. So there are people who benefit from myths and that's how myths get preserved and it took me about 40 years and that's not spoke 40 years to read some anthropology about myths and say this is what I'm dealing with. At first I kind of equated it to a religious faith where people believe things on the basis of faith and by the way that faith is really helpful for a lot of people by the way that's why religions are popular. And if you try to use fact to challenge someone's faith, you're out of luck because faith trumps facts and in the sociology of sport, the way I looked at things myth trumps a lot of the facts that we've come up with through good research in the sociology of sport. So we're fighting in a sense a little battle here how can we get by the myth and help sport become what people assume it is already doing and and when we when we show facts that mental health problems are being created within the context of sport that when we say the injuries are creating long-term health problems for physical health problems for people in sport and what we need to do is make some changes people go to the myth and say no. But the door is starting to open there and it's opening in a lot of different ways on on different issues so it pays to kind of stick to your position when you're asking critical questions. I think such a good way of understanding myth is that myths may not be empirical truths based on observable evidence, but they're social truths. And so they tell us a lot about the world we live in and I think it's it's also important to recognize I mean you've emphasized how myths serve the interests of the powerful which is 100% true but they don't but that's not all they do and I haven't like the example I always go back to and I know I've told you this before but I haven't said it on the podcast when my younger son was starting high school and we were you know I was interviewing the athletic director and she was telling me about how there's all these different clubs that students can participate in and I asked about a flag football club because my my both of my boys grew up playing flag football like coach them they were very good at it. I always say my my son could have been the starting would have been the starting quarterback of the high school football team if I'd let him play and he wanted to play in the athletic director she was very resistant to a flag football club and and I said but you know there's you know she was very like excited about the rugby club and the football team and I said there's all this research on brain trauma that says you know football and rugby which I played both of those in high school by the way are are very dangerous and her response was yes I don't believe that research and so again the empirical evidence is there to demonstrate an empirical truth but the social truth and you know she doesn't really benefit materially from supporting football a tackle football over flag football but emotionally she does she identifies with with tackle football as a sport for boys so this connects us to a very important concept in sports and society which is the concept ideology and in that first chapter you outline several different types of ideology gender ideology racial ideology social class ideology ableist ideology and and a most times when people hear the term ideology you know whether it's in the media or casual conversation it means something that's just like not true or no illusion you know you can discount somebody else's argument by saying oh that's just ideological however the chapter defines ideology as a shared interpretive framework that people use to make sense of their social worlds and evaluate themselves and others so I guess my question here is if people if if if people view ideology typically so negatively why for you is it so important in the study of sports and and society yeah I think that people have a problem with I with the term ideology and the whole concept of ideology in the political sphere because it really divides people there because people have different ideologies but most ideologies are widely shared within a culture we have an ideology related to gender that's widely shared and and you start questioning that the assumptions the ideological assumptions about mailness and femaleness about masculinity and femininity about the presentation of self in connection with those ideas and the roles of men and women males and females within society when you start questioning that you're going to get a lot of resistance and we are seeing that right now all over the place we'll talk about that later too with with intersex and and transsexual and transgender participants in sports people don't want to give up those shared beliefs they've grown up with them they are they are very close in some ways to myths because they are the are the summaries of the social and cultural truths within a society what people accept as truths and when when people say the world is divided into men and women males and females that is a social truth that they have grown up with there can be no exceptions to that and and when they talk about race they have grown up with the classification system that puts people into racial categories that don't fit with facts and but they've accepted them history has been built around them our culture has been built around them so in other words racial ideology is a form of social and cultural truth that the vast majority of people accept and when you question it you're going to get pushed back and that's the same thing with with respect to social class and disability there is there is an ableist ideology for example that the consists of shared ideas and beliefs that are widely used to identify people as either physically or intellectually disabled and justifying treating them as inferior to people who are able intellectually and physically and and that affects the organization of our social worlds of our physical worlds and the physical spaces that we live in because we don't take into account disabilities when we're designing a city or a building or access or sidewalks or curbs and that's what people with the disability with physical certain physical disabilities have objected to we don't want to be dismissed because of this ideology of this ableist ideology we want to be taken into account as a real human being that's the same thing with gender and the same thing with with race we want to be dealt with as a human being we don't want to be classified in a box out of which we cannot escape uh so so that's uh what makes ideology a contested thing in many cases when you start questioning because there's it's shared it's like the great sport myth that's shared by so many people that when you question it you're going to get pushed back and when you question certain ideologies you're going to get pushed back but myths can change and so can ideologies and we're seeing that right now in our own lives as the friends of my granddaughters are going through uh transitions gender and and and sexual transitions and going through hormone treatments and my granddaughters are friends with these people and they accept their humaneness apart from gender ideology but other people are not doing that and they're having one heck of a hard time accepting those people they see them as either deviant, immoral or unnatural and the same thing has occurred with in connection with race and in connection with disability you know just being disabled makes you unnatural it makes you different and there was a moral component to that earlier in American history and still in other societies if you have a certain kind of intellectual disability they see you as morally flawed and even with certain physical disabilities they see you as morally flawed so those are the kinds of issues that we confront when we go look under the surface on issues related to ideology and things like the great sportna I think putting together ideology and myth is so important because in my in my mind in the way I study the world the two are linked so if the ideology are the social truths the social constructions that are related to empirical truths but they're not based on empirical truths there is a relationship there but they're they're not based on empirical fact they're the social truths these social constructions what the myths do these are the stories we tell ourselves to make our social truths appear natural and inevitable and that allows us to confuse a social truth for an empirical truth and this is something that I'll struggle with with you know students in class particularly when we talk about transgender athletes in that chapter sometimes with gender sometimes with race but everything that you're saying here is showing how sports as a sport as an institution connects to other institutions race the economy media class so on and so forth and and that's why we have to be we have to be interdisciplinary in our approach to the study of sport because sport never stands alone it's not an institution unconnected to the media unconnected to the economy unconnected to broader populations which means race class gender sexuality all of these things and so it's it's so important for us to be able to make these connections and we have to be interdisciplinary in our approach and sports are thoroughly international so we can't just look at sport in the United States which makes so many people in the US comfortable to imagine that we it's one of the myths we have in the United States is that you know we're a shining city on the hill with a different historical trajectory than any other nation in the world and so that's that's I think the journey that we're taking this semester going through the chapters of sports and society definitely and by the way the United States is not the only culture within which that happens so when I've worked in Brazil and taught there and and done research there with colleagues the great sport myth is is really powerful there and it's tied to their culture in ways that that prevent many people in Brazil from asking any questions about the way soccer is organized for example and and some of their other sports so beach volleyball and the sports that are important within within their culture and so a lot of people who who are sociologists or physical educators they have a hard time asking critical questions because they've grown up with with these myths and and these ideologies so so being a sociologist is a challenge on the one hand but it's really exciting on the other because as you say when we study sport we we go beyond the boundaries of our discipline because we're asking questions about the deeper game here in sport and that forces us to look at sport from different angles and it's one of the great things that I like about the sociology of sport when I go to a conference and you go to a conference we're meeting people from other disciplines they're asking questions from slightly different angles and we're learning from each other in ways that we wouldn't if we were all asking questions strictly from within inside the disciplinary boundaries of sociology and I think that's true also for the people reading this reading the book sports and society and taking this sociology of sport class if you're not a sociology major is again being able to look at things from different perspectives asking questions that people in your field who have accepted the myths and sociology we have our own myths right it's not this is not unique to any single group of people miss operate everywhere but to be able to question your own myths is such a valuable skill that you can develop while you're in college so I think we're we're we're running a bit long here on time so we probably want to wrap up this first episode and we've got a lot of other topics to to get through in in our coming episodes so thank you so much Jay it's always a pleasure talking with you so you're welcome and I look forward to getting some critical feedback from our listeners well that is it for chapter one Jay will and I will be back in the next episode to discuss chapter two producing knowledge about sports in society how knowledge is produced in the sociology of sport and we'll be looking forward to talking to you then