Fear and Fantasy Realized in Sports

post composed by David Shields

On the occasion of the University of Nebraska Press’s reissue of Body Politic, I was interviewed by the Mariners Radio Network; Patrick Lagreid asked me what I thought about the recently completed 2007 Major League Baseball Season. I started laughing, because I realized I didn’t even know who had won the World Series. I don’t follow sports really, and I haven’t for a very long time. What I follow instead are the crises in and around sports: The Oklahoma State football coach who berated a female sports reporter for not only writing an article that portrayed an OSU player in an unflattering light but also for committing the sin of not being a mother. The male U.S. women’s national soccer coach who inexplicably changed goalies for the final game, and the fascinating way in which the team then turned on the spurned goalie. The scapegoating of Marian Jones, Barry Bonds, Michael Vick. Sports are a primitive arena in which the culture’s deepest fears and fantasies, its most powerful secrets get revealed, its fault lines exposed, if you only now how and where to look. Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine looks for those fault lines in the culture, in athletes, in spectators, and in me.
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David Shields' Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine is now available from Bison Books.  His books Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season and his novel Heroes are also available from Bison Books, both in paperback.