Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing 981995584X, 9789819955848

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Lee McGowan Kasey Symons Editors

Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing

Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing

Lee McGowan · Kasey Symons Editors

Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing

Editors Lee McGowan University of the Sunshine Coast Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia

Kasey Symons Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-981-99-5584-8 ISBN 978-981-99-5585-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Foreword

In 1983, the first issue of Arete: The Journal of Sport Literature (later to become Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature) was published by San Diego State University Press. This publication was followed by the formation of the Sport Literature Association in 1984 during the first meeting in San Diego, California. The impulse, impetus, and formative work for this unusual alliance between sport and literature came from Lyle I. Olsen of the Physical Education Department, the managing editor of the journal; Alfred F. Boe of the English Department, the editor of the journal; and Roger L. Cunniff, of the History Department, the editor of the San Diego State University Press, which first published the journal. It is interesting, given the recent developments in the study of sport and literature, as well as the collaborative, inclusive, and wide-ranging perspective of this book, that the earliest work was interdisciplinary and collaborative by necessity. This blurring of disciplinary boundaries was met with skepticism by those who did not consider sport as a legitimate subject of intellectual inquiry. As sport continued to grow in popularity and cultural influence, however, critics began to see that the journal was ‘a forum for literature that incorporates sports into its world view,’ as written in a review in the Los Angeles Times in 1984. This stage in the development of writing about sport, literature, and culture was also given impetus by an increasing publication of sports fiction and poetry, anthologies, and doctoral research concerning sport as well as the offering of sport literature courses in universities. Interdisciplinary research—that is between disciplines—was also promoted by the interest of scholars in a variety of disciplines, the most notable of whom were sport historians who recognized the importance of sport literature as a worthy and valuable source in the writing of sport history. An internal critique by scholars in sports literature also provoked an expansion of the sport literature canon to include films, drama, poetry, and journalism and a need to integrate gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Further, the scarcity of international sport literature was noted as was the lack of attention to a connection of themes and multiple cross-examinations of texts. The linear and limiting perspective of traditional approaches was apparent and, if the study of sport literature were to develop, change was needed. As a result, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary v

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research eventually gave way to more transnational and transdisciplinary (across disciplines) perspectives as scholars with theoretical backgrounds in many disciplines and from various geographical regions examined the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality and included play, movement, recreation, and other forms of physical culture as the chapters in this anthology reveal. As the focus of these literary considerations and cultural forms expanded to recognise creative writing in order to further grapple with the allure of these various movement forms and physical culture, scholars have embraced collaborative engagement, bringing with them a multitude of approaches, methodologies, and theories including post-colonial theory, autoethnography, feminist theory, critical race theory, and selfreflexivity. Such perspectives have been enhanced by the inclusion of journaling and oral history to an already expanded, traditional canon of the literature. This anthology continues to move the field and our perspectives beyond traditional boundaries of binary thought, of traditional sports, of place, of cultural and national boundaries, of countries, of the role of media in constructing our understandings, of Eurocentric discourse, of gender, race, and sexuality. In these chapters, participants are not always conventional, elite level athletes. They are varied, multidimensional, and non-conventional versions of us. They are Afghan youth who have been transplanted to Sweden; female rodeo queens and clowns who challenge patriarchy; mountain climbers who risk their lives as well as face ethical choices; and victims of sexual abuse who simultaneously become boxers and creative writers and show the healing power of sport and writing. In times of globalization and transnational movements, matters of space and place and a ‘spatial turn’ have prompted authors to consider such topics as architecture and the intersections of literary spaces and sportsscapes; sports sections in libraries and bookstores are studied to understand the way in which they construct our understanding of sport; and we consider the way in which rodeo rings provide a space for gender reversals. The collaborative insights and understandings of McGowan and Symons in Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing have encouraged a focus on inclusion and diversity. They have prompted as well a consideration of the nexus, intersections, and interdependence of supposedly unrelated phenomena examined in these chapters. Although these concepts promote connections, a coming together of matters of difference, they also imply a certain linearity. They, nonetheless, delink sport and other forms of physical movement from traditional, binary, and dominant forms of discourse and inquiry and provide a more transdisciplinary point of view. The importance of creative writing and the inclusive nature of the chapters in this book connect this work to a variety of readers—academics, fans, participants, and others—who have been captivated by the ever-elusive meaning of a variety of forms of movement in culture. It is both a gesture toward circularity as well as a challenge to authors and creative writers to further engage in collaborative endeavors. Susan J. Bandy Independent Scholar

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the incredible contributors whose passion for this volume and dedication to their work continued to impress us through the duration of this project. Our authors sent us work from maternity wards, from after long meetings helping Afghani women’s footballers escape Taliban rule, while climbing the Himalayas, while working for Cricket Without Frontiers in Fiji, while escorting students through Spain, completing PhD theses, and navigating teaching, other projects and academic life in general during some of the most difficult years we’ve collectively experienced across the world. As editors, it was humbling and inspiring just how the contributors of this book shared our vision for bringing more attention to the diverse and creative ways we can tell sports stories, and how sports stories can teach us so much more than what we see in a final score. Every draft of exceptional work, every considerate question emailed, every note of encouragement and offer of collaboration we received while our authors were managing so much is testament to the power of a good project, and the good people in this niche field who support and champion each other. We cannot thank these wonderful people enough for choosing this book to showcase their work. We extend our gratitude to Amanda Fiedler whose insight and assistance in the editing and proofreading process was instrumental to the delivery of this Edited Anthology. Thank you, Amanda, for your attention to detail and dedication to this project. Thanks to the editorial team at Springer, to Alex Westcott Campbell for taking the project on, and to Aldeena Raju and Padmavathi Jagadeishkumar who so generously supported the editing and publishing process. This project has its roots in past collaborations, connections made at conferences and the spirit of collegiality in the intersecting fields of creative sports writing, sports literature and the sociology of sport. We’d especially like to acknowledge the Sport Literature Association (sportliteratureassociation.com) for being leaders in the study of sport in literature and culture. This association’s annual conference has inspired us to continue to grow the academic work in this field and many of the contributors have been connected through this wonderfully supportive and inclusive international cohort. The foreword of this book comes from one of this association’s leaders, a vii

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trailblazer in the field of sport literature. We thank Susan Bandy for her support of our work through her encouraging and thoughtful words. Additionally, the TEXT (Journal of Writing and Writing Courses) Special Issues team—Sue Joseph, Kate Cantrell and Emma Doolan, were key in championing our initial idea to bring more academic work together in this field and published our SI, Creative writing and sport (2022). We thank them for their support and the opportunity to pull members of our far-flung creative writing in sport tribe together and further our work in this volume. Kasey would like to acknowledge the support of her team, the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology for the time and space to continue work on projects that inspire and drive her. Lee would like to acknowledge the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast for the time and space to work on research and those colleagues in English, Photography, Sound Design, and Screen Media studies whose continuing kindness, support, wisdom, and generosity is so greatly appreciated.

Contents

Beyond the Box Score: Reflecting on the Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lee McGowan, Kasey Symons, and Amanda Fiedler

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Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Tradition as Platform of Expectation #Sportshelfie: Representation in the Sport Section of Australian Bookshops and Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kate Kirby and Amy Clarke

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Don Davies & Hugh McIlvanney: The Literary Football Reporters Who Elevated British Sports Journalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paddy Hoey and Lee McGowan

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Notes on a Scandal: Lemon and Haigh on Australian cricket’s ‘Sandpapergate’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth Ellison

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Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Place in Sports Fiction The Architecture of the Sporting Site in Irish Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gráinne Daly

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Fury and Failure in Spanish Football Stories of the 1960s . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adam L. Winkel

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“Air This Thin Turns Anyone into a Mystic”: Extreme Sport as Metaphor for Societal Disengagement in Steven Heighton’s Every Lost Country (2010) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Angie Abdou

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Contents

Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Intersections with Practice Write and Write It Again: Using Reflective Autoethnography and Practice-Led Creative Writing to Create New Narratives of Women in Sport . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Kasey Symons The Queen and the Clown: A Poetic Inquiry into Women’s Roles in Rodeo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Christina Thatcher Gesturing Towards Decolonial Openings: Sports and Poetry . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Sepandarmaz Mashreghi Creative Writing Tools in the Exploration of Intersections of Sport and Society Left Write Hook: ‘Boxing with the Boys’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Donna Lyon, Claire Gaskin, and Gabrielle Everall It Doesn’t Happen by Magic: Creatively Exploring the Process of Changemaking in Sport Through Moya Dodd and FIFA . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Catherine Ordway and Kasey Symons

List of Contributors

Angie Abdou Athabasca University, Athabasca, AB, Canada Amy Clarke University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, QLD, Australia Gráinne Daly University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland Elizabeth Ellison Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia Gabrielle Everall University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia Amanda Fiedler University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia Claire Gaskin Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia Paddy Hoey Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, England Kate Kirby University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, QLD, Australia Donna Lyon University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts, Southbank, VIC, Australia Sepandarmaz Mashreghi Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden Lee McGowan University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia Catherine Ordway University of Canberra, Bruce, ACT, Australia Kasey Symons Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Christina Thatcher Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK Adam L. Winkel High Point University, High Point, NC, USA

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List of Figures

#Sportshelfie: Representation in the Sport Section of Australian Bookshops and Libraries Fig. 1

Distribution of biographies/autobiographies in Brisbane-based bookshops, by sport (Source Authors, 2022) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Write and Write It Again: Using Reflective Autoethnography and Practice-Led Creative Writing to Create New Narratives of Women in Sport Fig. 1

Practice-led autoethnographic writing process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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List of Tables

#Sportshelfie: Representation in the Sport Section of Australian Bookshops and Libraries Table 1 Table 2

Comparison of sport sections of Brisbane-based bookshops, by total volume, gender distribution, and shelf display . . . . . . . . . . Example Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) used in Australian libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Beyond the Box Score: Reflecting on the Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing Lee McGowan , Kasey Symons , and Amanda Fiedler

Box scores on back pages and hagiographic biographies are what come to mind when we think of sports writing. Often maligned as low brow, sports writing is rarely considered as creative and nuanced, or seen in its multiple forms such as short fiction, poetry, plays, novels, long form essays, and creative non-fiction (see Symons et al., 2022). While some sports have been afforded something of a literary tradition, boxing for example with contributions from heavyweights Norman Mailer (The Fight, 1975) and Joyce Carol Oates (On Boxing, 1987), others, football (soccer) for example, the world’s most popular sport (Kuper & Szymanski, 2018), have, until recently, been regarded as having none (see McGowan, 2019). Sport is often viewed as theatre (Barthes, 1961/2007), as an agent of social control for the urbanised industrialised masses (Andrews, 2006), and a political tool (Elcombe, 2022). While Roland Barthes wrote essays on wrestling and yacht racing (1957/1993), and the Tour de France (1979/1997), in his 1961 collaboration with film-maker Hubert Aquin (What is Sport?), he meditates on what constitutes sport and the role it plays for an audience as a mediated manifestation, a catharsis for the spectator’s benefit (in short, ‘they, the players, do it so we, the watchers, don’t have to’), and distinguishes, draws a line, between a sporting life and the real one (1961/2007). One of football (soccer) writing’s most important figures, Brian Glanville, highlighted the scarcity of good football writing and asserted the reason

L. McGowan (B) · A. Fiedler University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. Fiedler e-mail: [email protected] K. Symons Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_1

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for its perceived absence was the very act of writing about an essentially workingclass pursuit immediately discounted the work from literary consideration (as cited in Braunias, 2001, para. 33). We argue sports writing provides the connective tissue to bridge Barthes’ distinction and dispel, to a degree, Glanville’s position. In describing sports journalism, David Rowe, underlined the practice as an action devoted to representing one popular culture by means of another (1992, p. 98). Where the act of sports writing as intellectual pursuit has been discussed in philosophical terms, socialised, and politicised, we are afforded fertile territory to explore sports’ many and multifarious issues through a range of often interdisciplinary approaches. We see this principle applied, with all its inherent complexity, in every form of sports writing included in this anthology. Some academics, such as David Goldblatt (The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football, 2006) and Kasia Boddy (Boxing: A Cultural History, 2009), have stepped outside academic publishing to bring their work to a broader readership. This action and the success of their work speaks to something any sports fan knows; sport is a strong social and cultural touchstone. Its fans and audiences are loyal and demanding consumers of related content. However, while we may appear to be an easy market for publishers, we are much more discerning, and those depictions of sport and its issues, challenges, and triumphs that we want to read and engage with—and produce—are far more nuanced and complex than the average newspaper or online platform would have you believe. To paraphrase Jeffrey Hill, we are afforded a better understanding of sport from the ways it has been written about (2012, p. 181). Creative writing researchers are not on their own in looking to stories of sport. Researchers in other disciplines look to sports fiction narratives as valuable sources of data, particularly where they represent and provide insight on the relationships between sport, individuals, and society (Bairner, 2017; see also Bairner, 2011; Hill, 2006). Fiction and non-fiction constructions have shaped and continue to reflect our notions of identity, morality, social relations, and other aspects of our societies (Hill, 2012, p. 181). The prism of the sports we love and watch and participate in creates the space for the writing to present our world back to us in powerful and diverse ways. This edited volume is positioned at the nexus of sports, society, and creative writing. It challenges amorphous and often simplistic generalisations of sports writing and creative writing related to sporting narratives and activities. In its analysis of literary contributions, examinations of craft, and explorations of the intersections at play, it offers rare consideration of a rich diversity of form in narratives of race, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and ability. Across the collection, theoretically informed and innovative approaches to sport, society, and creative writing deepen our understanding, speak to our curiosities, and challenge common generalisations of sports writing. They offer analysis and insight into the application of creative writing knowledges and practice in relation to sport, and its impact on wider discipline discussion and research. These works also begin to redress and re-centre voices often overlooked in the writing of sport and in sporting narratives. As contributors to the field of research on creative writing and sport ourselves, and as editors, we understand the responsibility

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we have in ensuring diverse and intersectional research conducted by a diverse, intersectional collective of scholars is represented in the field. We believe driving intersectionality in research goes beyond advertising calls for submissions and selection of work. A proactive, inclusive, and supportive approach can reach more academics, encourage emerging researchers, and consider different ways of ‘doing’, which can work towards decolonising research methods. We encourage others to work collaboratively with their networks in their chosen fields of scholarship, particularly in fields like sport that have been historically dominated by white, cisgender and heterosexual (cishet) men, to drive more diversity in the academy. We are aware there is more work to do and are passionate to continue to advocate for and support more diverse voices in sports research, as well as continuing to learn and listen to the experiences of others themselves. The most commonly understood approaches to intersections in creative writing related to sport, are predictably, predominantly, and overwhelmingly, non-fiction. We therefore begin with perspectives on the vast tracts of writing related to sharing the real sporting moment. The most common modes of sports writing are likely sports journalism and sports biography. The former, discussed at length by David Rowe (1992) and Thomas Fensch (1995/2013), categorised as ‘sports chatter’ (Eco, 1987, cited in Rowe, 1992, p. 97), consists of those match reports, match analyses, team selection debates, injury updates, transfer speculation, interviews, and discussions (with players, coaches, former players, experts, and pundits), and any of the myriad related narratives that drive daily online traffic to digital newspapers, magazines, and independent content providers (from clubs to fans and those with a passing interest) across multiple platforms. The sports biography, in all its shapes and forms, is the next logical step from a media cycle that draws explicit news into a broader ceremonial degradation of the athlete or subject for the sake of sensationalised reporting (Thing & Ronglan, 2015). The sports biography, like any other form of biography, often speaks to the subject’s justification of their actions and decisions, meets the readers’ nostalgic and or imagined view, and is insightful, where it ‘tells the personal story’ (Thing & Ronglan, 2015). These texts are usually shaped as autobiography (sometimes hagiography), or its ghost written equivalent, memoir, capturing a significant event (season win, medal triumph, near miss, post-event analysis and or celebration), historical documentation and exploration, reviews, or analyses, and of course, the expert or scandalised insider perspective (see Bale et al., 2004; Smith, 2014; Thing & Ronglan, 2015). The first part of this anthology, Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Tradition as Platform of Expectation, explores these two broad ‘conventional’ forms of sports writing. Part I opens with a chapter on prime real estate in the sports writing landscape; the commercial and publicly available sports writing bookshelf. Kate Kirby and Amy Clarke examine forms of representation in the sports sections of Australian bookshops shelves and library collections. Their chapter interrogates the complicity of androcentric assumptions of sports fandom, sports writing, and classification methods, reflecting on the popularity of the sports biography genre and what is communicated through display methods of sports writing in these spaces. They draw on their own professional experience, current academic discourse on library

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management and book publishing, and a snapshot survey of local bookshops and libraries, to consider the composition of sports shelves and some of the broader commercial and institutional pressures that impact operation and display decisions. They also consider some of the ways sports book consumers might exercise agency over bookshelves through social media hashtags, such as #sportshelfie. Paddy Hoey, a media studies scholar, and Lee McGowan, a sports fiction scholar, combine their knowledges of disparate crafts to investigate the literary techniques and approaches undertaken by two ground-breaking sports journalists, Don Davies and Hugh McIlvanney—two of the most innovative writers of their respective generations. While they emerged in different eras, from strikingly similar backgrounds, they each elevated British sports journalism beyond the condescension and contempt of a ‘toy department’ view of the sports pages by other sectors of news media (Rowe, 1992, p. 98). Davies and McIlvanney made frequent use of classical literature and high culture—colouring their work with complex metaphor and erudite allusion—to revolutionise sports reporting without ever losing touch with their readership and their own working-class heritage. It’s no exaggeration to state that Davies and McIlvanney were key among those who paved the way for the two Australian cricket writers whose work is examined in the third chapter of Part I. Elizabeth Ellison examines two works on the egregious scandal, ‘Sandpapergate’, one of the most significant in international cricket. In early 2018, the Australian cricketer, Cameron Bancroft, was caught by television cameras hiding what later emerged to be sandpaper in his whites. A cheat. Amid the media storm that followed, three players were suspended, the head coach resigned, and the sport’s national peak body commissioned several reviews. Before the year was out, Gideon Haigh published Crossing the Line: How Australian Cricket Lost Its Way and Geoff Lemon published Steve Smith’s Men: Behind Australian Cricket’s Downfall. Elizabeth Ellison’s chapter considers these sports writers’ writing styles, the thematic interpretations presented in their respective texts, and the power of long-form sports writing to make meaning from intense, unwieldly real-life moments. Sports writing also provides the opportunity to represent, re-investigate, and make meaning through, of, and from the imagined sporting moment. Place is key to fictional narratives, ‘it is where one country can nearly always speak reliably to another’ (Welty, 1977, p. 439). In sport, place and setting is not simply about venue, which, as we will see, can mean anything from a pitch to the side of a mountain. In the second part of the anthology, Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Place in Sports Fiction, each chapter considers instances where sport and creative writing converge and intersect around aspects of spatiality and temporality in the stories being examined. Much has been written on sport in Irish society and the sociological aspects of Irish literature. The spatial turn in literary studies has leant a sense of focus to the roles of place and time on the page, and Gráinne Daly’s chapter interrogates the topography of Dublin’s sporting sites in Irish fiction, where literature and sport are intrinsic to the expression of culture. Her study of a city’s sporting spaces, the places people gather, in their participation in and consumption of sport, reveals a close and intimate relationship between those sites and the city’s literature, one that can be

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used to map a rich sporting heritage. Her work examines ‘the elision of literature and the sporting space’, the ways sporting spaces are implicated in the embodiment of memorial consciousness, and the ways mapping a literary sportscape can lend understanding to the significance of a city’s architecture for creative writers. Spanish sports fiction produced during the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975) often linked Fascist ideals of masculinity to sport as an instrument of the regime. In the early 1960s, one of the country’s most tumultuous political periods, authors Camilo José Cela, Rafael García Serrano, Francisco García Pavón, and Manuel Pilares made use of the ‘fury and failure’ narrative trope employed by the Spanish sports media and government representatives across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to account for Spanish sporting success and failure. Adam L. Winkel’s chapter, the second in Part II, examines a specific footballing context, teasing out the complexity of characters and setting and its political discourse. In doing so he considers the temporal and spatial agility and movement afforded by the short story form, its capacity to take the reader beyond the pitch and the complex narrative layers that explore the win or loss within a nostalgic view of Spanish football’s origins, which also critique the modern game’s darker sides. The third chapter in the Part II considers one place, the Nangpa La, a high pass located at the border of Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and the fictionalisation of a single incident related to one extreme sport. Steven Heighton’s novel Every Lost Country (2010) opens with scenes based loosely on an actual mountaineering incident that occurred in September 2006. After they witness a shooting, a small group of climbers are forced to choose between helping the injured or continuing their own quest for the summit. The decision divides the party. Angie Abdou draws on Edgework Theory to interrogate Heighton’s rendering of the incident as it occurs at the intersection of politics, mountaineering, and the ethics of extreme sport. In its discussion of the fictionalisation and subsequent fictive narrative, the chapter considers a number of the novel’s themes, questions, and concerns: the suffering of strangers, appropriate responses to injustice, the possibility of redemption in disengagement, and argues that creative writing, in this case long-form fiction, allows for a sustained and nuanced exploration of the complex relationships between time and place, social obligations, and the privileging of athletic goals in such an event. Prose and poetry are powerful tools in understanding and informing creative writing practice as research that responds or relates to sporting activities. Despite the content of Part II, and the considerable wealth of material written about sport, there is a disproportionate lack of diverse literature in sports fiction and poetry that captures or represents a given sport, or sports, and active recreation. This has led to limited representations of the many lived experiences inside most sporting cultures. In the anthology’s third part, Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Intersections with Practice, the chapters consider the creative writing process. Its contributors explore the ways creative writing as research can seek to redress experiences that have been overlooked or excluded in the discourse. These two chapters act as starting points to the inclusion of more voices and varied experiences in sport, and they also work to show the diverse ways creative writing practice can be employed in the process of creating

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new works. These chapters draw on a small number of approaches including practiceled creative writing (Smith & Dean, 2009), reflective autoethnographic writing in sports research (see Chang, 2008; McParland, 2012), poetry informed by history—or at least a lack of historical representation—and poetry as reflection on migration and belonging. These methods challenge ways we’ve come to consider sports writing, add experiences back into the discourse and the field, and create new narratives. Each one demonstrates the value of telling more diverse stories and furthering our understanding of the intersecting fields of sports history, sport for development, fan engagement, and sport management. Kasey Symons, a sport and social impact researcher and writer, employs prose to explore the creation of alternative sporting narratives that facilitate more nuanced depictions of women’s experiences in sport as fans. The first chapter in Part III considers representations of women in sport, which remain limited, and those of women as fans, which are portrayed in stereotypical or one-dimensional ways. Through a progressive self-interrogation by the writer researcher in the sporting narrative context, the chapter demonstrates the ways reflective autoethnographic practice-led writing can be used to create considered representations of women who are fans of elite men’s sports, develop richer, more intricate portrayals of the many varied ways women experience sport, and explore positionalities and potentialities in the process for those from different marginalised communities engaged and interested in sporting stories that reflect their own lived experiences, particularly those stories omitted from or overlooked in sports-related media and literature. The second chapter in Part III considers hidden aspects of the histories and lived experiences of a sporting community. Through the practices and processes of Poetic Inquiry and the creation of new works, researcher practitioner Christina Thatcher uncovers hidden histories of women in the sporting and cultural phenomenon of the rodeo, a form which celebrates the histories and mythologies associated with the American West. The chapter explores two roles undertaken by women in the rodeo, the rodeo queen and the rodeo clown—two athletes often overlooked in the arena. Two original lyric poems are used to illustrate and scrutinise contrasting expectations and pressures placed on the women who undertake these roles, especially the inherent challenges meeting expectations can present for those women inhabiting them. At the centre of this chapter is a deepening of our understanding of what it means to be a rodeo queen and a woman rodeo clown in a sport dominated by men and the ways poetry can meaningfully document dichotomous positions in this space. As Symons’ chapter examines the fan experience and highlights complex gendered fan narratives that are not reflected in sport literature, and Thatcher’s chapter draws attention to the exclusionary history of cowboy narratives, the chapter by Sepandarmaz Mashreghi documents delinking sporting participation from its Eurocentric thought and competitive sports cultures. The third chapter in Part III centres on a collaborative project with ten young Afghani people living in Sweden. From a decolonial standpoint, the study engages with sports and poetry through a participatory artbased research paradigm. These theoretical frameworks and approach underpin the exploration and subsequent revelations around the group’s participation in sporting activities as they work together to recover otherwise forms of engagement with the

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aim of bringing about a means of re-existence (Walsh, 2015), and ways of knowing historically negated by Eurocentrism. This chapter would just as comfortably sit in Part IV of this book, however, we’ve situated it in Part III, where new original works of poetry and prose are woven through the chapter to map positionality, contextualise themes, and illuminate personal experiences that influenced the scholarship. The final part of the book, Creative Writing Tools in the Exploration of Intersections of Sport and Society, demonstrates the powerful ways creative writing can add to and enhance our understandings of sport and society in areas not traditionally aligned to creative practice in sport. We tend to think about intersections of sport and society in creative writing through traditional approaches, such as sport management and sport sociology research. The chapters in Part IV establish platforms to build our understanding of the rich and diverse array of methods used to tackle the questions, issues, and concerns that lie at the nexus of sport and society in and through creative writing. Both chapters use creative writing and creative writing methodologies such as autoethnography, journaling, and oral histories as tools for excavation, for support, for the gathering of insight and the documentation of experiences, to understand sports intersections with the body, by processing and surviving trauma, and with the law, in driving systematic change toward gender equality. The incorporation of creative methods into research and reflections in these fields of research allows us to centre the voices of those with lived experiences, gain new insights for implementation, work to make sport a better place, and build on sport’s incredible capacity for achieving social impact. It is important to note that the chapter written by Donna Lyon, Claire Gaskin, and Gabrielle Everall requires a content warning as it discusses personal accounts of rape, incest, and the long-term and adverse effects of childhood sexual abuse. A critical reflection from three adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, incest and rape, Boxing with the Boys, is an intensely personal output from the University of Melbourne creative arts and sports intervention program and research project, Left / Write // Hook (LWH), which tests the premise that the combination of writing and boxing in a group setting can help counter some of the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. The chapter documents and offers insight and analysis of a session within the LWH workshops program where participants joined trained boxers in the boxing ring. Through writing and boxing, the session’s aim was to present participants with an experience of agency, strength, and power. The trained boxers agreed not to hit back or defend themselves. The research contributes to feminist sports scholarship that advocates for the redress of gendered inequities through lived experience. The LWH project explores the intersection of writing, sporting activity, and empowerment; adding the voices of survivors to public discourse, when they tend to be private and solely therapeutic. The aim of the program is to raise awareness around systemic socio-cultural and political problems that enable incest and rape. Written by sports lawyers Moya Dodd and Catherine Ordway with and informed by writer, researcher, and auto ethnographer, Kasey Symons, the final chapter of the anthology also examines challenging systemic socio-cultural and political problems. Football, the world’s most popular sport, carries an extensive legacy of gender

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exclusion, from banning women from playing in many jurisdictions to their conspicuous absence in its leadership. Implicit and conscious biases continue to perpetuate the under-development and under-resourcing of the women’s game, and the underrepresentation of women in its key decision-making roles. Concurrently, allegations of corruption have plagued football, its officials, and its governing bodies, including FIFA, with limited progress or accountability. The FIFA Gate crisis (2015–2016) provided much needed impetus for structural change and reform, including a growing acknowledgement and commitment to women in football. This chapter centres on lived experience and the autoethnographic methods and reflective writing practices employed to gain insight, and an insider perspective on, formal evaluations of policy change for women in sport. Moya Dodd, a chapter author and one of the first women ever to sit on FIFA’s Executive Committee, submitted reform proposals and gave voice to the broader community of support for gender reforms within the organisation. In doing so the chapter encourages more practitioners to adopt creative writing practices to give voice to those driving change and highlight the process by which progress towards gender equality was, and can be, achieved. This anthology gathers the work of researchers from a range of fields to discuss, examine, explore, and reveal the rich interwoven layers of the theoretical, practical, creative, and conceptual approaches employed where intersections of sport and society in creative writing occur. Its narratives of inclusion, geography, class, gender, sexuality, and sporting level offer examples and illustrate instances where those concepts, paradigms, and phenomena intersect, overlap, and converge. Across an eclectic assemblage of subjects, and the application and investigation of the processes, practices, notions, and liminal spaces of an intersectional array of sports writing from diverse range of methods and voices, this anthology reminds us that writing about sport—like sport itself—is dynamic. Sports writing engages with the complexity and nuance of human emotion and experience. Sports writing is a site of cultural and collective memory-making that teaches us about what it means to be human. From commercial and public bookshelves, sports sites, sports writers and sports literatures, poetry focused on dislocated communities engaged in the pursuit of decolonised sporting activities and those works addressing the absence of women in histories of rodeo, to the intersections of writing and boxing in the reflexive reclamation of the post-trauma self, challenging football governance and changing its laws: this collection offers new perspectives on the roles of sports in creative writing and what creative writing can provide in furthering our understanding of sport in society.

References Andrews, D. L. (2006). Sport–commerce–culture: Essays on sport in late capitalist America (Vol. 11). Peter Lang. Barthes, R. (1957/1993). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Vintage. Barthes, R. (1961/2007). What is sport? (R. Howard, Trans.). Yale University Press.

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Barthes, R. (1979/1997). The Eiffel Tower, and other mythologies. University of California Press. Bairner, A. (2011). Soccer and Society in Eva Menasse’s ‘Vienna.’ Sport in History, 31(1), 32–48. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460263.2011.554717 Bairner, A. (2017). Sport, fiction, and sociology: Novels as data sources. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 52(5), 521–535. https://doi.org/10.1177/10126902156177 Bale, J., Christensen, M. K., & Pfister, G. (2004). Writing lives in sports: Biographies, life-histories and methods. Aarhus University Press. Boddy, K. (2009). Boxing: A cultural history. Reaktion. Braunias, S. (2001). There’s a writer of the field. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Chang, H. (2008). Autoethnography as method. Left Coast Press. Elcombe, T. L. (2022). Sport in times of turmoil: Political uses of sport in global crises. Global Society, 36(4), 538–561. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600826.2021.1973382 Fensch, T. (1995). The sports writing handbook (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978 0203812037 Goldblatt, D. (2006). The ball is round: A global history of football. Penguin. Hill, J. (2006). Sport and the literary imagination: Essays in history, literature, and sport. Peter Lang. Hill, J. (2012). Queering the pitch: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and the cricket novel. Sport in Society, 15(2), 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2012.637692 Kuper, S., & Szymanski, S. (2018). Soccernomics: Why England loses, why Germany and Brazil win, and why the US, Japan, Australia, Turkey—And even Iraq—Are destined to become the kings of the world’s most popular sport. Nation Books. McGowan, L. (2019). Football in fiction: A history. Routledge. McParland, S. (2012). Autoethnography: Forging a new direction in feminist sport history. Journal of Sport History, 39(3), 473–478. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.39.3.473 Rowe, D. (1992). Modes of sports writing. In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Journalism and popular culture (pp. 96–112). Sage. Smith, H., & Dean, T. (2009). Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh University Press. Smith, M. (2014). Sports biographies. In S. A. Reiss (Ed.), A companion to American sport history (pp. 634–655). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118609446.ch28 Symons, K., McGowan, L., & Hickling, A. (2022). Introduction: Creative writing and sport. TEXT, 26(Special 67), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.37817 Thing, L. F., & Ronglan, L. T. (2015). Athletes confessions: The sports biography as an interaction ritual. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 25(2), 280–288. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/sms.12198 Walsh, C. E. (2015). Decolonial pedagogies walking and asking. Notes to Paulo Freire from AbyaYala. International Journal of Lifelong Education, 34(1), 9–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 02601370.2014.991522 Welty, E. (1977). Place in fiction. The South Atlantic Quarterly, 76(4), 438–453.

Lee McGowan is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast. His primary research interests are in the intersections of sport, creative writing and community engagement. As a practitioner researcher, Lee has a keen interest in community stories, in their telling and their presentation. He produces sole and co-authored traditional and non-traditional research outputs. His publications include books, journal articles, book chapters, a digital history, a touring exhibition, fiction, creative non-fiction and locative literature. Kasey Symons is a Research Fellow in the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Her work focusses on women in sport, fan

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culture, sport media and literature and sport and social impact. Kasey is also a sports writer and co-founder of the women in sport media platform, Siren Sport. Amanda Fiedler is a Ph.D. candidate, sessional academic and research assistant in the School of Business and Creative Industries at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Amanda’s research explores the sociohistorical intersections of fact and fiction in media ecologies, with a focus on representations of gender in media texts. Amanda has published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies.

Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Tradition as Platform of Expectation

#Sportshelfie: Representation in the Sport Section of Australian Bookshops and Libraries Kate Kirby

and Amy Clarke

Abstract Sport biographies and autobiographies are popular among the general public and a prominent feature of the sport sections of Australian bookshops and libraries. This chapter reflects on the popularity of this genre, and particularly on the overarching messages that are communicated through the variety of, and display methods for, these books in such spaces. Drawing upon our professional experience, academic discourse on library management and book publishing, and data taken from an informal survey of bookshops and libraries in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), we consider how, why, and what the composition of sport shelves represent in terms of sport within society today. The continued obfuscation of women athletes is noted, as are some of the broader commercial and institutional pressures that impact the ways in which bookshops and libraries operate. We conclude this chapter by contemplating the agency that book consumers might exercise over bookshelves, particularly via social media hashtags such as #sportshelfie. Keywords Sport writing · Biography · Library collections · Bookshops · Gender representation · Australian sport

Introduction Sport biographies and autobiographies have received criticism for being mediocre hagiographies (Murray, 1993; Symons et al., 2022). However, they remain popular with the general public because of our collective ‘obsession with the intimacies of individual people’s lives’ (Currie & Brien, 2008, n.p.; see also Smith, 2014). A staple of Australian bookshops and libraries, the sport section holds a wide range of sport-related life writing (a term encompassing biography, autobiography, memoirs, K. Kirby (B) · A. Clarke University of the Sunshine Coast, Maroochydore, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] A. Clarke e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_2

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diaries, and letters; see Currie & Brien, 2008). This chapter reflects on the popularity of sport biography/autobiography in Australia, and more specifically, on the overarching messages that are communicated through the variety and display of these books in bookshops and libraries. In taking this focus, we consider how, why, and what these shelves represent in terms of sport within society today, and we draw attention to the continued obfuscation of women athletes. This chapter acknowledges the commercial and institutional pressures that impact the composition and display of sport bookshelves, as well as the influence that publishers, booksellers, and librarians have in the promotion of certain books over others. We also contemplate the agency that book consumers could (and perhaps should) exercise over bookshelves and suggest the adoption of the #sportshelfie social media hashtag as a way to foster increased public awareness and debate about this issue. The functions, ambitions, and audiences of bookshops are distinct from that of libraries, and there are differences between their respective sport sections. Bookshops are guided by commercial imperatives and are vulnerable to fluctuating cultural trends, while libraries are a community service that operate as archives of sociocultural memory. For this chapter, we conducted an informal survey of a small number of bookshops and public libraries located in Brisbane (the capital of Queensland, Australia) in August 2022, in order to examine sport shelves/sections regarding the extent and nature of biographies and autobiographies held therein. One of the authors is a qualified librarian with over fifteen years in the sector, while the other author worked in commercial bookshops in Australia from the early- to mid-2000s. We draw from this professional experience in addition to our survey data, as well as from academic discourse on book publishing and retailing, and library collection management. In doing so, we shed light on the underlying and largely invisible forces that hold sway over the design, organisation, and stocking of bookshops and libraries. This chapter begins with brief observations on the visibility of sport writing across the media spectrum, before focusing on the characteristics and societal appeal of two kinds of life writing: sport biography and autobiography. The discussion then turns to our 2022 survey findings, first examining the variety and visibility of sport biographies/autobiographies in bookshops, and then in libraries. We reflect on some of the more overt trends that emerge from this data, particularly the underrepresentation of women athletes, as this is an issue that has been gaining increased attention but has not been examined in a bookshop/library context. The reasons for this representational discrepancy and other observed patterns across the surveyed sport sections are contemplated. Unlike other forms of non-fiction, biographies and autobiographies are typically authored by (or focus on) well-known public figures, and it is the opportunity to learn more about these individuals’ lives that motivate people to buy or borrow these books. The success of this type of publication is thus tied to the existing visibility or celebrity of the subject/author. It is therefore likely that the biographies/autobiographies of athletes who have higher profile careers—including being featured prominently by the media—will be more popular because of nameand face-recognition. The findings discussed throughout this chapter are reflective of a much broader phenomenon which has beset professional sport globally since its

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inception: the prominence of a small number of specific sports (and sport stars), to the detriment of the majority. It is beyond the scope of the present work to consider the role played in this uneven representation of sports and athletes by government (in matters of policy and funding), nor is it our goal to interrogate in detail the influence of the news media. The former is the subject of the first author’s doctoral research (to be submitted in early 2024), and the latter has been examined by numerous scholars already (Cooky et al., 2013; English et al., 2019; Pippos, 2017). Nevertheless, we must acknowledge from the outset that the observations we make in this chapter regarding sport sections in bookshops and libraries are but one piece in a larger and more complex puzzle.

The State of Contemporary Sports Writing in Australia The placement of sport writing in media and popular culture today is structured yet changing. Whannel (2002) has noted the ‘distinct spaces’ of sport, including the sport pages of newspapers (p. 54). Regular readers know to find the sport section at the rear of the newspaper, with the most important sport headlines emblazoned on the back page. The number of people consuming their sport news via newspapers in Australia is decreasing, with media companies limiting or cancelling print runs. News Corp recently ceased printing over 100 regional Australian newspapers, and while around 75 of these titles initially retained a digital presence, many have since been absorbed into the capital city mastheads of their respective states (Mason, 2020; Meade, 2021; News Corp Australia Announced Portfolio Changes, 2020). Despite sport news consumption moving online, the legacy of the newspaper ‘backpage’ placement persists on digital platforms: one needs to scroll past breaking news stories, trending topics, and regional or local news to get to sport results and commentary. That the sport section of news websites is often positioned after reporting on current global and local affairs, but before other ‘niche’ topics such as arts and culture, reflects the perception of sport as having broad appeal. This may be particularly true in countries like Australia, where sport constitutes a central pillar in the collective national identity. It is in these societies in which many people—even those without an active interest in sport—feel compelled to demonstrate an awareness of sporting headlines in everyday conversation. The same cultural impetus is behind the continuing popularity of sport biographies and autobiographies in these countries. The shift from traditional print media to online platforms has also, however, allowed for new perspectives to emerge. New online sport media outlets have responded to delivery changes and are disrupting the digital sport news environment. An example is Siren: A Women in Sport Collective, which has a mission to ‘elevate women’s voices, alongside other diverse and marginalised voices to deliver feminist content that challenges the status quo of sport media’ (About, 2022). Siren is among a growing number of content creators that have delved into podcasts, which are often freely available and not restricted by paywalls like some online sport news offerings. These changes in the sport media landscape are noteworthy,

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as they may be an early indication of changes still to come in other aspects of sport culture. The emergence of feminist sport news and commentary via online outlets and podcasts, for instance, may hint at growing public interest in this still underrepresented demographic of athletes. This could in turn translate into a greater appetite for life writing by and about women in sport. It is to this particular segment of sport publications—biography and autobiography—that our discussion now turns.

Sport Biography and Autobiography Printed sport biographies persist despite changing and increasingly digital modes of media consumption. Visit any Australian bookshop or library and you will likely observe shelves dedicated to this genre of sport writing. In 2003, Australian sport historian Gary Osmond noted that both biography and autobiography were ‘currently enjoying great popularity’ (2003, p. 63), and a ‘reviving in popularity’ has also been observed in other countries (see Smith, 2014, p. 651; Thing & Ronglan, 2015, p. 280). Some approaches to this genre have nevertheless attracted criticism. In 1979 John Lucas lamented a ‘tempo of mediocrity’ and noted that ‘too many [sport-related books] are glossy, laudatory hymns of praise’ (p. 216). More recently, SamanthaJayne Oldfield (2015) reflected on ‘celebrity culture encouraging distorted hagiographies rather than well-rounded narratives’ (p. 1864). This is perhaps not surprising, considering the elevated nature of successful sportspeople in contemporary society as ‘role models’ and stars who—in addition to regularly appearing in newsfeeds and on screen—often feature in multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns for a wide range of brands. Children are encouraged to idealise sportspeople as ‘heroes’, and people can maintain emotional investment in the careers and lives of athletes throughout adulthood. Such an environment is conducive to the publication of biographies that are overly celebratory in nature. Regardless of the prominent position enjoyed by sportspeople in contemporary society, it is noteworthy that many sport books appear to have a short shelf life in shops and in home libraries, as evidenced by their concentration at second-hand book sales. This begs the question: what makes for a quality sport biography with longerterm appeal and multi-generational readership? Lucas has called for ‘more research and writing that blends the work of the craftsman and creative artist’ (1979, p. 216). Maureen Smith has reflected on ‘patterns to better biographies’, including quality research, with the evidence available for the reader to follow in endnotes, and the author actively ‘questioning myths’ (2014, p. 651). The literature also indicates that meaningfulness can be achieved when the story of the sporting individual connects to broader social and cultural issues of the time (Lucas, 1979; Oldfield, 2015). The appeal of sport biographies is inherently related to the interplay between myth and truth: Oldfield describes ‘layers of truth’ as being present (2015, p. 1862). The overall accuracy of a sport biography cannot be assumed, as it is often tempered by the motivations of the writer, the sporting identity on whom it is based, the publisher, and even the target audience. It should also be noted that some readers may prefer to

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have their sporting heroes valorised and portrayed in an overly favourable manner, and may be less concerned about the gritty, hard ‘reality’. Sport biographies in Australian bookshops and libraries are, for the most part, about professional athletes. Smith has noted a similar trend in America, stating that these publications ‘generally covered athletes and coaches, along with a few notorious owners, usually winners, and often sport heroes’ (Smith, 2014, p. 634). Existing academic discourse considers what Lone Friis Thing and Lars Tore Ronglan term the ‘framing and faming’ of professional athletes in this genre (2015, p. 280), with Smith observing a change in recent years that has made these texts ‘less about the heroic athlete and more about capitalising on an athlete’s fame’ (2014, p. 634). Various functions, themes, and arcs have been observed within the genre. Garry Whannel considers thirteen ‘functions in the narrativisation of careers,’ which place the athlete across, for example, emerging, accomplishing, celebration, scandal, failure, and redemption stages (2002, pp. 54–55). Oldfield summarises ‘typical themes’ including ‘humble origins, apprenticeship and growth, overcoming adversity, and stability and success’ (2015, p. 1863). The academic literature also points to various narrative approaches, including the confessional, the exposé, and the success story (Oldfield, 2015; Thing & Ronglan, 2015; Whannel, 2002). One can also consider what biographies are not included on sport shelves. In a 2008 analysis of sport, history, and autobiography, Matthew Taylor reflected on the contents of such books and ‘the corresponding emphases and silences’ (Taylor, 2008, p. 477). Smith makes a clear point in this respect, observing that ‘female athletes have been largely marginalised in the sports biography genre, with [the] majority of biographies on women aimed at young readers’ (Smith, 2014, p. 650). Sport autobiographies account for a small but not insignificant portion of books in Australian bookshops and libraries. In addition to the issues noted with biographies, further limitations of the autobiography genre include potential bias, subjectivity, and unreliability (Osmond, 2003; Taylor, 2008). The phenomenon of ghostwriters in this genre has been noted in academic discourse, with many recognising the role of the publisher in making connections between sporting identities and ghostwriters (Osmond, 2003; Taylor, 2008; Whannel, 2002). James Pipkin (2008) questions whether such a relationship shifts a sport autobiography into ‘a kind of authorised biography’ (p. 9). Despite these observed limitations, sport autobiography has much to offer researchers and casual readers. Taylor suggests one can ‘look beyond the fragments of verifiable information’ and ‘focus instead on their development as cultural texts’ (2008, p. 470). Australian sport historian Gary Osmond has noted that the genre documents social memory. He points to the role of the reader making connections to their own memory and reminds us that it is not just the text at play but also ‘various non-prose forms’ (e.g., timelines, scores, photos) creating these connections with social memory (2003, p. 65). Viewing sport life writing as cultural texts or as acts of social memory enables conversations about the usefulness of the genre beyond a narrow focus on accuracy. We can think of these publications as texts that not only have broad socio-cultural appeal to the reading public, but which— because of their commercial nature as products intended to generate sales—reflect the dominant attitudes, interests, and values of that public. It is with this in mind that

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we now turn to a closer examination of the sport sections and shelves of Australian bookshops and libraries.

The Australian Bookshop Sport Shelf Despite an ongoing news cycle declaring the death of bookshops, this form of retail persists in Australia as an important social space for the community. These institutions are agile in aligning with consumer demand, as demonstrated by the pivoting of their services during the Covid-19 pandemic with improvements to online presence, free home delivery, and drive-through pickup (Australian Bookshops Respond to Covid-19, 2020). This ability to keep pace with the changing retail landscape is reflective of the broader commercial imperatives that have historically dictated how bookshops operate. Unlike libraries, bookshops are for-profit businesses, and the increasingly crowded bookselling marketplace has prompted design decisions intended to convert casual browsers into repeat, high-value customers (see Gardiner, 2002; Li, 2010; Trott & Novak, 2006). Even before competition from online booksellers emerged, children’s sections were typically located at the rear of stores in order to draw shoppers past every other section before reaching their destination (Li, 2010). There are no accidents in the organisation of bookshops: each section is situated to assist customers in their browsing, while simultaneously increasing the chances of piquing their interest in adjacent sections. Similarly, the merchandising decisions reflect this balance between facilitating browsing and a desire to increase sales. While books will generally be organised by author surname (particularly in fiction sections) or by sub-category (e.g., types of sport), customers will also notice that new releases, bestsellers, and books that have been in the news are more likely to face cover-outwards on the shelf, rather than spine-outwards. Books that are stocked facing cover-out occupy a larger amount of shelf ‘real estate’ and their cover design enhances their marketing potential; this gives the impression that they are more popular or important than other books and increases their likelihood of being picked up and perused. In Australian bookshops, the sport section can often be found in the immediate vicinity of the popular history, military, and hobby sections. This positioning reveals much about the perceived tastes of customers who might be drawn into that part of the store, and then be tempted to browse nearby shelves. In Queensland, the sport section often appears as a wall of maroon, reflecting the colour of Queensland’s State of Origin rugby league team. The prominence of Maroons imagery is evidence of the integral role the inter-state competition plays in a collective ‘Queenslander’ identity. This is a clear example of a sporting event which is regarded as having general societal relevance throughout the year, appealing to people beyond and in addition to the ‘typical’ sport fan cohort. In the southern states of Australia, we would instead expect to see the sport section dominated by the colours—and star players—of the local Australian Rules Football (AFL) teams, as they exercise a similar degree of impact on the cultural discourse of their respective communities. Aside from these

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regional distinctions, the sport shelf in bookshops appears as a constant and not a seasonal display. At times it swells in line with key sporting games, championships, or the death of a sporting identity. It is also particularly well-stocked around Father’s Day, when sport books are promoted alongside military and political histories as ideal gifts. Among the sport non-fiction in bookshops sits a range of biographies and autobiographies. Australian shops are similar to their American brethren, where ‘biographies of athletes are rarely included in the biography section of a bookstore, but rather are placed in the sports section’ (Smith, 2014, p. 634). This placement indicates that bookshop managers consider sport biography/autobiography as more ‘sport’ than ‘biography’—unlike in libraries, as will be discussed later. Other types of publications that can be found within the Australian bookshop sport section include almanacs and compendiums, encyclopaedias, commemorative coffee-table books covering a team’s history or the success of a particular season, and edited collections of sport journalism. This section caters to several distinct types of readers, such as people with an interest in statistics and rules, dedicated fans of teams and sportspeople, and those who might be described as ‘casual’ browsers with a general interest in multiple sports. To examine the current state of the sport shelf in Australian bookshops more closely, one of the authors visited four different stores in Brisbane (Queensland) on the same day in August 2022. Observations were made about the kinds of titles that were available, as well as shelf placement and arrangement; inventories were taken to generate a dataset for analysis. The findings reflect only the titles available on the shop floor (i.e., visible to the public for purchase), and do not include any additional stock that might have been in storage. As can be seen in Table 1: Comparison of sport sections of Brisbane-based bookshops, by total volume, gender distribution, and shelf display, Bookshop 1—belonging to a national chain and situated in a suburban shopping mall—held two full shelves dedicated to sport. With 199 different titles on display, there was almost an equal share of general sport titles and sport biography/autobiography. Of the 102 sport biography/autobiography titles, 88 (86.3%) were about men and 13 (12.7%) about women, as well as one title about a horse. Bookshop 2—another national chain situated in the same suburban shopping mall—held a similar number of titles on its shelf dedicated to sport, with biographies/ autobiographies accounting for 39.27%. Of these, 66 (88%) were about men, eight (10.7%) were about women, and one (1.3%) was about a horse. Bookshop 3—one of a small group in a boutique chain, situated in an inner-city retail and dining precinct— held only 30 titles about sport, and these sat in a single row beneath other topics. Of those observed, 11 (36.67%) were sport biography/autobiography titles, and all of these were about men. Finally, Bookshop 4—an independently owned store located in another inner-city retail and dining precinct—held one row and an additional display frame of books dedicated to sport. Of the 45 titles on sport in this store, 19 (42.22%) were identified as biographies/autobiographies; of these, 14 (73.7%) were about men, and five (26.3%) were about women. The stark difference in the sizes of the sport sections in Bookshop 1 and 2 (both belonging to national chains in suburban settings) compared to those of Bookshop 3 and 4 (both being high-end ‘boutique’

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shops in inner-city areas) is, we suggest, reflective of each store’s perceived customer demographic. Overall, 465 sport-related titles were noted across the four shops’ sport sections, with 207 (44.52%) identified as biographies/autobiographies (see ‘Total’ row, Table 1). Of these, 86.5% were about men, and 12.5% were about women (the remainder about horses). When considering the placement of biographies/ autobiographies, 10.61% of the titles about men were placed facing cover out to consumers, and 7.69% of the titles about women were facing out. This near-parity is solely down to Bookshop 4, which skewed the overall numbers: it had 40% of its sport biographies/autobiographies on women facing out, while the other three bookshops did not display any titles about women in this way. Therefore, not only were there significantly more titles about men available overall, but in three of the four bookshops, they were positioned in a far more visible manner than those about women in sport. A further point of interest is the nationalities of the people featured in Table 1 Comparison of sport sections of Brisbane-based bookshops, by total volume, gender distribution, and shelf display Number of titles on sport shelf

Biography/autobiography titles on sport shelf Total

About men

About women About animals

Bookshop 1

199

102 (48.74% of sport books)

88 (86.3% of auto/ biographies) 15.91% facing cover out

13 (12.7% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

1 (1% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

Bookshop 2

191

75 (39.27% of 66 (88% of sport books) auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

8 (10.7% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

1 (1.3% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

Bookshop 3

30

11 (36.67% of 11 (100% of sport books) auto/ biographies) 9% facing cover out

0 (0% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

0 (0% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

Bookshop 4

45

19 (42.22% of 14 (73.7% of sport books) auto/ biographies) 8.57% facing cover out

5 (26.3% of auto/ biographies) 40% facing cover out

0 (0% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

Total

465

207 (44.52% of sport books)

26 (12.5% of auto/ biographies) 7.69% facing cover out

2 (1% of auto/ biographies) 0% facing cover out

Source Authors, 2022

179 (86.5% of auto/ biographies) 10.61% facing cover out

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the biographies/autobiographies when sorted by gender: while there were fewer such titles about women overall, they had a higher representation of Australian athletes. Of the 207 total biography/autobiography titles identified, just over half (53.17%) were about Australian athletes; and within this cohort, 50.84% were Australian men, and 69.23% were Australian women. From this finding, we suggest that there is a greater awareness of (and perhaps interest in) female athletes competing at the national level in Australia than there are of non-Australian female athletes competing at the international level. Aside from questions of gender and nationality, attention was also given to the types of sport featured (see Fig. 1). Of the 207 biography/autobiography titles identified across the four bookshops, over half were about just six sports: cricket, motorsports, Australian rules football, tennis, basketball, and rugby league. When crossanalysed with the other survey data, tennis appeared as the sport with the most balanced spread of biographies/autobiographies about men and women; this is a finding that is repeated in the library survey discussed in the following section. Sports with the highest percentage of books with covers facing out included cricket, motorsports, Australian rules football, tennis, basketball, rugby league, soccer, boxing, and swimming. Our data was collected during the National Rugby League and Australian Football League seasons which could account for placement prioritisation in those areas. It was not cricket season at the time of the survey, however, the number of cricket titles remained significant both in cover-out display and total volume; indicating perhaps that certain sports have year-round appeal to readers. Overall, our survey of Brisbane-based bookshops revealed that life writing is a particularly popular component of sport sections, but that this genre is dominated by male authors/subject matter. Certain sports, like tennis, are closer to parity in terms of gender representation, but there are also some (swimming, crossfit, dressage,

Fig. 1 Distribution of biographies/autobiographies in Brisbane-based bookshops, by sport (Source Authors, 2022)

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and gymnastics) in which all titles had women subjects, albeit in modest numbers of titles on the shelf, because these sports were far less represented than others. It is noteworthy, too, that the obfuscation of women in sport generally was repeated across all four bookshops surveyed, despite these stores having different business models, clientele, and physical locations. As noted earlier, bookshops are commercial enterprises, and the stock they offer for sale reflects the perceived tastes and demands of their customers. A final point about bookshops should be made regarding classification and cataloguing processes of the titles stocked, and where books are placed in store. While independent bookshops may follow their own system that has been devised ‘in house’, the shelving practices of chain bookshops are generally guided by decisions made centrally. This means that any given book should be in the same section of each store in the chain, and staff are discouraged from moving books to ‘unapproved’ sections. A chain’s sticker labels—which are applied to books before they are shelved for sale—often incorporate a text code (such as ‘FICT’ for fiction, or ‘ART’ for art and architecture) near the barcode, indicating to staff the specific section in which to place each book. This correlates with the store’s database, so that staff can locate titles quickly in the predetermined section indicated on the book’s label. While this system provides clarity for staff, it can confuse customers, who might expect to find a sport biography in the sport section, and—after checking this part of the store and seeing no sign of that book—leave empty-handed, not realising that a central classification decision has forced staff to shelve that book elsewhere. Publishers play a part in this too, as they often include genre classifications on the back-covers of books, as well as shelving suggestions to booksellers. We have noticed, for example, that certain sport-related books, such as Sister Secrets: Life Lessons from the Pool to the Podium (by swimmers Bronte and Cate Campbell, 2021), are sometimes shelved exclusively in the children’s section. It is with influences such as these in mind that we now turn our attention to libraries, which have broader responsibilities to society, and which are driven by different collection motivations.

The Australian Library Sport Shelf The sport section in Australian libraries varies in composition and display, depending on the type of institution. The drivers behind collection decisions in school or university libraries differ from those of local council, state, and national libraries. Collection development policies, often publicly available, specify the formulas for building each collection to meet the needs of the target audience. As such, collection development policies impact the types and amounts of sport biographies/autobiographies purchased for each library, where these books are placed, and how long they are kept. Local council (or municipal) libraries often focus on providing reader access to popular leisure books, including sport biographies/autobiographies, in addition to fiction, which is typically the most accessed part of the collection (Saarinen & Vakkari, 2013). A search conducted in August 2022 of the Brisbane council library

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network’s online catalogue showed a range of recently published sport biographies/ autobiographies. The library catalogue looks like an online bookshop, with a clean interface and cover images promoting each book. One can ascertain from which branch a book can be borrowed or can place a hold on individual book titles. The public can also view how many holds have already been placed on a book, demonstrating the popularity of individual titles. For example, at the time of perusing the catalogue in question, 31 holds had been placed on The boy from Boomerang Crescent, the Eddie Betts autobiography published in early August 2022. This title appeared in the library catalogue several months before it was released with a note that it was ‘coming soon’, allowing users to ‘get in line’—a feature that arguably contributes to the hype around its release. An in-person visit to several branch libraries within this same network indicated that all biographies/autobiographies were located separately to the general nonfiction collection, despite being digitally catalogued as general non-fiction. Sport biographies/autobiographies were shelved with those of politicians, celebrities, and other public figures, indicating a different organisational approach than that of the surveyed bookshops. Perhaps libraries view this genre as more ‘biography’ than ‘sport’, and librarians expect readers to go looking for sport life-writing in the biography section rather than elsewhere. This hints at a broader debate that has been ongoing in the library management sector for many years: how to divide up collections in a way that will assist the greatest number of readers in their browsing goals (see, for instance, Maker, 2008; Trott & Novak, 2006). In non-fiction collections we might expect these decisions to be heavily influenced by the library’s system of classification (e.g., Dewey Decimal, Library of Congress Subject Headings), which—as will be discussed momentarily—have also been the target of increased debate in recent times. State and national libraries commonly have a broader collecting focus than other types of libraries and have a commitment to preserving the memory of the state or nation in question, sometimes as part of legal requirements to maintain records for copyright. The State Library of Queensland (SLQ), which is funded by the Queensland state government, outlines a strategy of collecting across content, usage, and viability. The content assessment section of the strategy details elements such as levels of historical and cultural significance, provenance, uniqueness, and representation with application dependent on the type of collection assessed (Content Strategy, 2020). It should be noted that because of the sheer scale of their holdings, state libraries like SLQ keep a substantial number of books stored off-site or in staffonly areas. This means that the in-person visibility of sport-related books at SLQ is not necessarily the same as the visibility of these books in the online catalogue. A search in SLQ’s online catalogue OneSearch shows the depth of sport biographies/autobiographies held in the state collections. Focusing on a single sport provides an indication of the scale of SLQ’s holdings. Using subject heading searches related to tennis—which was revealed in our bookshop survey as the sport closest to achieving gender parity in number of stocked titles—identified that SLQ had 24 relevant tennis biographies/autobiographies, published between 1958 and 2022. Interestingly, while there was an even distribution of biographies/autobiographies of

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men and women overall (12 each across the entire period); books on women players outnumbered those of men across the period 1958–1999 (six about women, four about men). There is a noticeable glut of tennis-related biographies and autobiographies held in SLQ’s collection that have been published since 2000—eight about men, and six about women. This is essentially on par with the results observed for tennis biographies and autobiographies stocked in bookshops. The success of Australian athletes—men and women—in international tennis competitions is reflected more generally across SLQ’s collection, as when the nationality of the players featured in these books is considered, most titles (83.33%) are about Australian athletes, a trend that is particularly noticeable from early 1990s publications onwards. It should be acknowledged that tennis is arguably one of the higher-profile sports in which Australian players have consistently achieved at the highest levels, and Australia also hosts an annual Grand Slam tournament (the Australian Open in Melbourne). The early success of Australian players including Margaret Court, Evonne Goolagong Cawley, John Newcombe, and Rod Laver has been matched in more recent times by players such as Pat Cash, Pat Rafter, Lleyton Hewitt, and Ashleigh (Ash) Barty; these people were and remain high-profile figures not only in Australian sport, but in Australian society generally (Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Pat Rafter were awarded ‘Australian of the Year’, for instance, while Lleyton Hewitt and Ash Barty were each ‘Young Australian of the Year’). It is therefore not surprising that SLQ holds a substantial spread of biographies and autobiographies about both Australian men and women tennis players from the 1960s–2020s. Libraries, even more than bookshops, have sizable inventories that exacerbate the need to make individual items ‘discoverable’ for readers in an easy, efficient manner. Staff want to place books in the section or location they think makes most sense to the public. However, these shelving decisions are also dictated by institutional needs, including the expectation that the placement of books will follow a kind of centralised, transparent, and logical classificatory system. Librarians are well-known for their penchant for detailed digital cataloguing records classifying each item in library collections. They are what drives information discovery in online library catalogues, contributing to the way information is presented to library audiences. However, such records are not without fault. As Hope Olson and Rose Schlegl described in 2001, ‘critiques of subject access standards in LIS literature have addressed biases of gender, sexuality, race, age, ability, ethnicity, language, and religion as limits to the representation of diversity and to effective library service for diverse populations’ (p. 62). The discovery of structural bias in these systems is not a recent phenomenon; issues with representation in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) had been identified in the 1970s (Gerhard et al., 1998, p. 130). In 1993 Margaret Rogers reflected on male bias in LCSH noting classifications relating to sport as a place of ‘clinging bias’ where ‘the implication is still that men are the norm’ (p. 194). Recently, Brian Clark and Catherine Smith described how within LCSH ‘narrower terms are denoted, or marked, as being differentiated from what must serve as a default value’ (Clark & Smith, 2022, p. 6). Along this line, Safiya Umoja Noble points to the example of ‘women accountants’ in LCSH structures to demonstrate how ‘women were consistently an aberration to the assumed maleness of a subject

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area’ (2018, p. 139). The LCSH structure used to be worse than this, with the literature (see, for example, Knowlton, 2005, p. 133; Rogers, 1993, p. 182) detailing how in the early 1980s the LCSH structure was formulated around category terms beginning with ‘Women as…’ instead of just ‘Women…’. LCSH is in use in Australian libraries, with the National Library of Australia (NLA) noting it as ‘the most commonly used subject cataloguing standard in Australia’ (Standards, 2022). Table 2 highlights some examples of Australian library catalogue subjects about sport whereby the LCSH uses ‘women’ to lead headings, implying that this deviates from the norm. While there may have been no intention to create bias, such an approach assumes maleness in subject headings unless the word ‘women’ is present. K. R. Roberto questions the status quo in such systems enforcing ‘normative boundaries for queer sexualities and gender’ (2011, p. 63). Should all genders be grouped together under the same classification? Should we simply be thankful it is no longer ‘Women as cricket players – Australia – Biography’? Or are further structural changes warranted to how information is classified and organised in order to reflect societal expectations of the day? While processes for updating LCSH are open to contributions from the public (Process for Adding & Revising Library of Congress Subject Headings, 2022), libraries can also enact their own inclusive metadata measures. In America, Duke University Libraries have adopted a Statement on Inclusive Description, which ‘acknowledges that the creation and management of metadata are not neutral activities’ and provides five steps they are taking in information classification and organisation (Duke University Libraries, 2021). These steps include proposing changes to LCSH, and internal efforts to implement ‘vocabularies from alternative subject and genre thesauri’. Table 2 Example Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) used in Australian libraries

Cricket

Cricket players—Australia—Biography

Cycling

Cyclists—Australia—Biography

Women cricket players—Australia—Biography Women cyclists—Australia—Biography Surfing

Surfers—Australia—Biography

Swimming

Swimmers—Australia—Biography

Tennis

Tennis players—Australia—Biography

Women surfers—Australia—Biography Women swimmers—Australia—Biography Women tennis players—Australia—Biography Source Authors, 2022

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Concluding Remarks: Challenging the Status Quo? In this chapter, we have centred our discussion around two key premises. First, that the breadth, composition, and organisation of biography/autobiography collections in bookshop and library sport sections can provide insight into wider societal attitudes and trends. And second, that there are numerous invisible forces—of commerce, space limitations, classification and labelling systems, and staff perceptions of client needs/desires—that impact how these sport sections are formulated. We noted in our introductory remarks, too, the government and media influence over sport, particularly with regards to the kinds of sports (and sportspeople) that are given greater degrees of support and press coverage. In many respects, the composition and appearance of bookshelves in sport sections is a product of—rather than a major contributing factor in—the ongoing representational dynamics of professional sport in Australia, and further afield. But with the widespread proliferation of social media, there is, perhaps, an opportunity for these dynamics to be challenged. Social media is changing not only how books are consumed but also how they are discussed and discovered. Alison Flood (2021) has documented the #BookTok phenomenon on TikTok, in which social media users and influencers share reading recommendation videos. This has had noticeable impacts on fiction sales charts and trends (Flood, 2021). The desire felt by many social media users to participate in the global reading community is reflected on Instagram, too, where in August 2022, the hashtag #bookstagram had over 80.4 million posts, #shelfie had over 3.1 million posts, #bookstack had over 1.8 million posts, and #bookshelfie had over 342,000 posts. Annie Brown (2019) observed that online communities gathered around these hashtags, engaging and discussing titles, and publishers were taking note. While these are not of the same level of social importance as other viral hashtags which have rallied millions to causes such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo, it is noteworthy that policy makers and businesses have become hyper-aware of the potential power of social media trends of all kinds, as well as of the value of engaging with ‘influencers’ to reach niche audiences. Publishers, bookshops, and libraries will continue to make decisions around sport biographies/autobiographies that are guided by the invisible forces we have identified in this chapter, just as government and media bodies will—intentionally or otherwise—give greater degrees of support and coverage to certain sports and athletes over others. But all these institutions use social media to engage the public. Bookshops and libraries—as localised, community-facing enterprises—have an even stronger imperative to interact with and respond to readers and consumers through this medium. Social media is ultimately a public space, and booklovers and sport fans can use this technology to gather, share, document, and advocate for their reading interests. Social media offers a platform for consumers to demonstrate what they expect in this space. The existing #shelfie hashtag focuses on curated shelves of books across different themes and aesthetics and is arguably too generic to serve as a rallying point for targeted, genre-specific discussion and debate. As such, we propose instead the adoption of the #sportshelfie hashtag across social media platforms. This could

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facilitate critical, reflective discussion among readers, publishers, bookshop staff and librarians, and provide a centralised space for documenting the contents and display choices of sport sections around the world. This is unlikely to change macrolevel factors influencing professional sport, but it would give the end-user—readers, and/or sport fans—some agency to advocate for sport writing and media that more accurately represents their interests.

References About. (2022). Siren: A women in sport collective. https://sirensport.com.au/what-is-siren/ Australian bookshops respond to Covid-19. (2020). Books + Publishing. https://www.booksandp ublishing.com.au/articles/2020/03/18/147865/australian-bookshops-respond-to-covid-19/ Brown, A. (2019, August 11). Instagram is the book club we need right now. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/life-and-relationships/instagram-isthe-book-club-we-need-right-now-20190809-p52fgu.html Clark, B., & Smith, C. (2022). Prioritizing the people: Developing a method for evaluating a collection’s description of diverse populations. Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly, 60(6–7), 560–582. Content Strategy. (2020). State library of Queensland. https://www.slq.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/ ContentStrategy.pdf Cooky, C., Messner, M., & Hextrum, R. (2013). Women play sport, but not on TV: A longitudinal study of televised news media. Communication in Sport, 1(3), 203–230. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 2167479513476947 Currie, S., & Brien, D. L. (2008). Mythbusting publishing: Questioning the ‘runaway popularity’ of published biography and other life writing. M/C Journal, 11(4), n.p. https://doi.org/10.5204/ mcj.43 Duke University Libraries. (2021). Statement on Inclusive Description. Duke Wiki. https://wiki. duke.edu/display/DTSP/Statement+on+Inclusive+Description English, P., Calder, A., Pearce, S., & Kirby, K. (2019). A new sporting horizon: A content analysis of Super Netball newspaper coverage. Media International Australia, 17(1), 110–124. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1329878X18798696 Flood, A. (2021, June 25). The rise of BookTok: Meet the teen influencers pushing books up the charts. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jun/25/the-rise-of-boo ktok-meet-the-teen-influencers-pushing-books-up-the-charts Gardiner, J. (2002). Reformulating the reader: Internet bookselling and its impact on the construction of reading practices. Changing English, 9(2), 161–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/135868402200 0006276 Gerhard, K., Su, M., & Rubens, C. (1998). An empirical examination of subject headings for women’s studies core materials. College & Research Libraries, 59(2), 130–138. https://doi.org/ 10.5860/crl.59.2.129 Knowlton, S. (2005). Three decades since prejudices and antipathies: A study of changes in the library of Congress subject headings. Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly, 40(2), 123–145. https://doi.org/10.1300/J104v40n02_08 Li, J. (2010). Choosing the right battles: How independent bookshops in Sydney, Australia compete with chains and online retailers. Australian Geographer, 41(2), 247–262. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00049181003742369 Lucas, J. (1979). Sport history through biography. Quest, 31(2), 216–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00336297.1979.10519938

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Maker, R. (2008). Finding what you’re looking for: A reader-centred approach to the classification of adult fiction in public libraries. The Australian Library Journal, 57(2), 169–177. https://doi. org/10.1080/00049670.2008.10722463 Mason, M. (2020, May 28). News Corp print closures leave regional media on life support. Australian Financial Review. https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/ news-corp-print-closures-leave-regional-media-on-life-support-20200528-p54x7m Meade, A. (2021, April 29). News Corp Australia merges more than 20 regional newspapers with capital city mastheads. News Corp Australia merges more than 20 regional newspapers with capital city mastheads. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/apr/29/news-corp-australiamerges-more-than-20-regional-newspapers-with-capital-city-mastheads Murray, M. (1993). “Boys will be boys”: The construction of the men of league. Sporting Traditions, 10(1), 24–36. News Corp Australia announced portfolio changes. (2020). News Corp Australia. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press. Oldfield, S. (2015). Narrative methods in sport history research: Biography, collective biography, and prosopography. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 32(15), 1855–1882. https://doi.org/10.1080/09523367.2015.1132202 Olson, H., & Schlegl, R. (2001). Standardization, objectivity, and user focus: A meta-analysis of subject access critiques. Cataloguing & Classification Quarterly, 32(2), 61–80. https://doi.org/ 10.1300/J104v32n02_06 Osmond, G. (2003). Shimmering waters: Swimming, autobiography and social memory. Sporting Traditions, 20(1), 63–71. Pipkin, J. (2008). Sporting lives: Metaphor and myth in American sports autobiographies. University of Missouri Press. Pippos, A. (2017). Breaking the mould: Taking a hammer to sexism in sport. Affirm Press. Process for Adding and Revising Library of Congress Subject Headings. (2022). The library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/aba/cataloging/subject/lcsh-process.html Roberto, K. R. (2011). Inflexible bodies. Journal of Information Ethics, 20(2), 56–64. Rogers, M. (1993). Are we on equal terms yet? Subject headings concerning women in LCSH, 1975–1991. Library Resources & Technical Services, 37(2), 181–196. Saarinen, K., & Vakkari, P. (2013). A sign of a good book: Readers’ methods of accessing fiction in the public library. Journal of Documentation, 69(5), 736–754. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-042012-0041 Smith, M. (2014). Sports biographies. In S. Riess (Ed.), A companion to American sport history (pp. 634–655). Wiley. Standards. (2022). National library of Australia. https://www.nla.gov.au/about-us/standards Symons, K., McGowan, L., & Hickling, A. (2022). Introduction: Creative writing and sport. TEXT , 26(Special 67), 1–5. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.37817 Taylor, M. (2008). From source to subject: Sport, history, and autobiography. Journal of Sport History, 35(3), 469–491. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26405132 Thing, L., & Ronglan, L. (2015). Athletes confessions: The sports biography as an interaction ritual. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 25, 280–288. https://doi.org/10.1111/ sms.12198 Trott, B., & Novak, V. (2006). A house divided? Two views on genre separation. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 46(2), 33–38. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/house-dividedtwo-views-on-genre-separation/docview/217897479/se-2 Whannel, G. (2002). Media sport stars: Masculinities and moralities. Routledge.

Kate Kirby is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of the Sunshine Coast researching the history of high performance sport in regional Australia. She has a MInfTech, GradDipLib&InfSt, and B.A. Working in history and heritage education, Kate was a recent Historian in Residence for the Sunshine Coast Council and a visiting scholar at the National Library of Australia. As a qualified

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librarian, Kate has previously been a Board Director of the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA). Dr. Amy Clarke is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of the Sunshine Coast. She specialises in heritage, identity politics, British colonial and Australian socio-cultural histories. She has a Ph.D., M.Sc. (Res), GradCertTertT, and B.A. (Hons 1), and was a Duke University Fellow (2018–2019). Amy is the Deputy Editor of Historic Environment, an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries Scotland and a Full International Member of ICOMOS. She appears regularly on Australian radio as a cultural history and heritage commentator.

Don Davies & Hugh McIlvanney: The Literary Football Reporters Who Elevated British Sports Journalism Paddy Hoey

and Lee McGowan

Abstract For many years the journalism on the sports pages of British newspapers was looked upon with condescension, seen as frivolous in comparison with the serious intentions of the news and op-ed departments. However, this attitude failed to recognise the contributions of several sports writers whose use of metaphor and allusions to high culture elevated sports journalism in Britain. This paper examines the contribution and innovation of two of the most important writers in the post-war period, the Guardian’s Don Davies and the Observer’s Hugh McIlvanney. Davies brought a deep knowledge of classical literature and culture in writing about football in his native North-West of England before his death in the Munich air disaster in 1958. McIlvanney, whose inventive use of metaphor and striking turn of phrase saw him revolutionise sports reporting in and become the only sports-writer to be voted Journalist of the Year in Britain. Keywords Football writing · Soccer writing · Don Davies · Hugh McIlvanney · Football journalism · Creative non-fiction

Introduction Mannion is Mozartian in his exquisite workmanship. His style is so graceful, and so courtly, that he wouldn’t be out of place if he played in a lace ruffle and the peruque. (Don Davies in Cox, (1962, p. 146). Using Shakespeare’s words to praise somebody we know is bound to be a rather wild risk, but at that dinner in Manchester I took the chance, invoking Mark Antony’s lines about Brutus: P. Hoey (B) Liverpool John Moores University, John Fosters Building, Liverpool, England e-mail: [email protected] L. McGowan University of the Sunshine Coast, Sunshine Coast, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_3

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P. Hoey and L. McGowan ‘His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world “This was a man.”’ It did not seem over the top at the time and it still doesn’t. (McIlvanney, (1997, pp. 120–121).

Sports journalism has traditionally been viewed as not being among journalism’s ‘most prestigious disciplines’, and as ‘the toy department of the news media – that is, in a place dedicated to fun and frivolity’ (Rowe, 2007, p. 386). In the hierarchy of journalism, sports reporting is positioned as soft news, less important and less vital than its kin; a refuge for those that did not want to do the work of hard news journalists, a place populated by fans with typewriters (Boyle, 2006, p. 181). However, since the mid-twentieth century, a small number of erudite sports journalists, including those writing about football specifically, in Britain at least, broke new ground and established new traditions and practices; practices that have resulted in a body of work worthy of literary consideration. Writers including Henry Rose, John Arlott, Geoffrey Green, and Brian Glanville reported on sport in philosophical and ‘high-brow’ terms. They saw it exist in the same cultural and moral space as classical music, art, and literature and argued that it tells us much about the human and national conditions. Hugh McIlvanney (2019), one of two writers under close examination here, noted that: After more than 30 years of writing on sport it is still possible to be assailed by doubts about whether it really is a proper job for a grown person. But I console myself with the thought that it is easier to find a kind of truth in sport than it is, for example, in the activities covered by political or economic journalists. Sports truth may be simplistic but it’s not negligible. (para. 3)

This is not to say these writers saw sports journalism, to borrow the oft-quoted Bill Shankly aphorism, as important as the life-or-death nature of news and current affairs; but they recognised equities, certainly parallels, and realised opportunities to reflect on the artistry they saw in the game, in ways that would match a fans’ own reverence. This chapter argues the football writing of McIlvanney, and that of his natural predecessor, Don Davies, innovated and elevated the form and intent of sports journalism. In light of their work, it would be taken more seriously and become more difficult to dismiss. We do not suggest these men are pioneers, as we note there are others worthy of analysis, merely that these two were instrumental in their profession’s capacity to capture greater cultural acceptance and that they did so by drawing on their knowledge of the arts and their employment of an array of rhetorical and literary devices that turned football journalism into literary football writing. The quotes that open this chapter illustrate its key themes and reflect its primary purpose; to examine the ways British sports journalism has been elevated beyond the traditions of journalism by two writers, Don Davies and Hugh McIlvanney. They had different educational backgrounds. Davies attained a scholarship at the University of Manchester and turned to journalism while working as a schoolmaster. McIlvanney, the son of a miner, eschewed university to take the then conventional route from local newspapers to national papers in Fleet Street. Yet their working-class upbringing

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would shape remarkably similar outlooks on sport and its writing. They shared a love of the arts and developed styles that often incorporated metaphor, simile, and intertextual allusion. They were perfectionists; Davies ‘had nothing but contempt and scorn for anything that was slipshod or unworthy’ (Cox, 1962, p. 13), while McIlvanney’s regard for accuracy was uncompromising, ‘maddening’, and often, ‘intrusive’ (Mitchell, 2016, paras. 7–9). They were not the only journalists known to be meticulous, but they were renowned for their fervency and accuracy. Neither were they the only journalists to employ narrative elements, but they are the best, or at least among the very best, in the heroic elevation of the prosaic events of a traditional match report. They also developed successful careers in broadcasting alongside their print journalism; Davies on BBC Radio’s fledgling Sports Report; McIlvanney as the suave presenter of sports documentaries. Their reports, woven through with dramatic narrative threads, conveyed hidden depths, the subtexts and or greater learnings of sport for the spectator, alongside the humanisation of their protagonists. Their triumph, ultimately, was a masterful transportation of the quotidian. Davies’ quote (above) notes Wilf Mannion, an English player of distinction in the 1940s and 50s who played for Middlesborough FC for most of his career and was universally revered. Rather than be concerned with the player, our concern here is the writer’s use of complex metaphor, alliteration, and allusion. The humorous comparison with Mozart belies the seriousness with which we should consider Mannion’s skills, paralleled as they are with the great German composer. The obvious alliteration is much more carefully chosen than a first glance suggests. The composer is heralded for the clarity, balance, and transparency in his work, particularly where surface-level simplicity and airy delicacy mask his work’s exceptional power. The allusion to Mannion’s uncommon technical ability, his balletic grace, fleetness of foot appeared incongruent to his remarkable dynamism and robust strength. The references to attire and wig may seem dowdy and possibly a little tacky today, but they speak to an eye for detail, extension of the metaphor, and no small amount of erudition—who would know on first pass that a peruque was a particular shape of wig? There is also a lively relationship between form and content, the kind of verve captured in description of the artists, Mannion and Mozart, in their own right. In the late 1940s, like Mannion’s prodigious talent, writing like this had not been seen on newspaper sports pages. McIlvanney’s quote (above) appeared as the conclusion of his obituary for his friend and legendary Manchester United manager Sir Matt Busby in the Sunday Times in 1994. It juxtaposes a keen understanding of Shakespeare, in this case the tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599 [2003]), with depth of understanding of his audience. Again, rather than focus on the quote’s subject, Busby, our concern here is the writer’s use of intertextual allusion. Choosing to recall Mark Antony’s view of Brutus from the end of the play would be risky for several reasons, but far more apt seen on the initial surface. Brutus is arguably more commonly and simplistically seen as a traitor to Caesar. In a successful playing career, before joining the club, Busby had turned out for United’s fiercest rivals, Liverpool and Manchester City. By the end of the play, Antony recognises and paints Brutus as a principled defender of democracy, as the most honourable of men. McIlvanney seeks to depict Busby in

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the same light. There are additional parallels. The irony of the events that followed the play’s narrative—Octavius, Caesar’s heir and a key ally to Antony in the defeat of Brutus’ forces, dishonours Antony and becomes the first Emperor of Rome, the very principle that Antony and Brutus struggled against. Busby stood steadfastly for what was right at the club, despite the pressures to submit to change, and even returned out of retirement to managerial duties when things were going badly. McIlvanney nimbly acknowledges Busby’s grace and fortitude in the comparison, but also runs the risk that his audience, not as familiar with Shakespeare’s work, would miss the layers of meaning in the compliment. Even without this intertextual allusion, McIlvanney’s notion of what a “man” is before a room full of footballers—most likely exercising overt hypermasculine sensibilities—is well placed, even where the speaker’s reach for such literary comparison risks seeming pompous or worse still, the potentially dangerous proposition of condescension. The quote illustrates McIlvanney’s acknowledgement of these risks, to compare Busby to Brutus, but it is the final refrain that is the most telling. His thoughts on his choice of phrase highlights a confidence in his gamble on the reference at the time and his reflection in the prevailing years had not shaken him from certitude. Before we discuss the elevation of sports, and primarily, football journalism, it is important to note that journalists, in predominantly English-speaking domains at least (the outer limits of this study), have tended to work to traditional parameters, bound as they are in the ‘inverted pyramid’ model. The model guides information presentation of the most important or newsworthy facts of a ‘story’, as directed by a subjective hierarchy of prominence, often determined by the journalistic publication (Keeble, 2006). The inverted pyramid incorporates the five Ws of journalism; the who, what, why, where, and when, which inform the ‘lede’ and or opening paragraphs and provide a summative understanding of the story’s most important elements as early as possible. Additional detail is provided to fill out each of these elements as the ‘story’ is developed. The journalist maintains arms-length ‘objectivity’ throughout, characterised by distant third person point of view. Predating word processing or computer-aided production, the origins of this method of approach emerged in the print production practices adopted and adapted in Britain and the USA and increasingly regarded as outmoded, outdated, and among the many factors contributing to declining standards of journalism (Scanlan, 2003). The formulaic, utilitarian nature of the inverted pyramid and its distillation of the facts of a story based on perceived import can skew and/or lead to neglect of the deeper, often more fascinating, narrative for journalist and reader alike. Football journalism is a subgenre of the broader category of sports journalism, itself a subgenre of traditional journalism (Rowe, 2007). Football journalists have comfortably operated in breach of the traditions of journalism since Don Davies and his peers exploited the tensions inherent in fan as reporter. We employ the term ‘fan’ here in its most common usage, not as a fan of a specific team with “an identity rooted in the unbreakable reciprocal relationship between fan and club’ (Giulianotti 2002, p. 27) but to denote a person with passion for their subject. Davies may have followed a particular team, but what shone through in his writing was a love for the game. He was objective in his match reports, but his passion for football and

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his thoughts on players and managers was far less so. If Davies opened the door to subjective perspectives in football journalism, McIlvanney, writing about football, boxing, and horse-racing with equal reverence, more than any other flung open the stadium gates. In their documentation of the ubiquitous game (Walvin, 2014), these writers eschewed the inverted pyramid and elevated our view and understanding of football by subverting traditions held fastidiously in other schools of journalism. For the sake of scope and scale, we focus on a small number of quotes and a small number of rhetorical and literary devices, including complex metaphor, alliteration, and intertextuality. There are additional limits to the study. It is rooted in the idiosyncrasies of British sports journalism and the customs and practices that produced this form. We are English speakers and researchers working in the areas of Media and Communication and Creative Writing. We can therefore only speak to the traditions of football writing in English and that of the British national press in the twentieth century. This chapter builds on research related to football writing by Paddy Hoey, Lee McGowan and David Forrest (2022). It situates the work of Don Davies and Hugh McIlvanney within the historical development of literary football writing (see McGowan, 2019). These writers are among a small number of erudite sports journalists credited with the elevation of football writing to its current standing as a crucial and specialised component of popular journalism. Harry Pearson notes that McIlvanney did not see football as ‘a puzzle to be solved, but an expression of character to be experienced’ (2019, para. 5). These writers arguably treat football with the same reverence and respect that fans hold for the game. The chapter will adopt textual analysis (see Hartley, 1999; McKee, 2003; Belsey, 2013) to examine a small number of articles, which are representative of each writer’s work and the ways a limited range of rhetorical and literary devices, more characteristic of creative non-fiction writing, are employed. Before the textual analysis, the chapter will review and distil football journalism’s development as a form. It begins in the 1930s with a brief look at Don Davies’ contemporary, Henry Rose. These writers were among the first to ‘speak’ to fans directly (see Mason, 1993). We consider the ‘purple prose’ of Geoffrey Green, from the 1950s, whose football reports were littered with literary references before touching on Brian Glanville’s substantial contribution to football writing. A prominent cultural shift in writing about football occurred in the 1980s with the emergence of the fanzine, a new type of football journalism, characterised by the game’s ‘outsiders’ and their influence on the rise of the literary football writer in the 1990s (for further reading on football fanzines see Brewster, 1993; Dixon, 2020; Haynes, 1995; Hoey et al., 2022; Millward, 2008; Rowe, 2005). However, inclusion of discussion on their respective impacts on the form are outside the scope of this chapter’s focus on two writers. In the next section, we contextualise Davies and McIlvanney’s significant contribution to the field for football journalism. This informs our analysis of a small number of examples of their work. To effectively illustrate the historical development of British football writing between the 1930s and 1970s we now consider a small number of prominent writers whose works each marked the form’s evolution.

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The British Football Journalist as Pioneer In the interwar years, British football writing became the domain of aspirant though amateur sports writers, hiding behind pseudonyms, such as ‘Left Half’, ‘Home Goal’ or the ‘Corinthian’. These writers initially and regularly produced dense, detailed, rigid columns thick with text replete with mundane references to the classics over actual reportage of the football match (Fishwick, 1989). When American sports writing, alongside other cultural exports, music and film for example, became fashionable in Britain during this period, it forced the authors of turgid football reports to adjust. The writing became less formal and increasingly, and at times heavily, influenced by Americanisms. British football journalists, Jeff Hill argues, ‘forsook the prosaic for the imaginative, the human drama and the ‘behind the scenes’ story’ (2002, pp. 44–45). Lengthy text heavy columns became interspersed with images, graphics and sub-headings, and shorter sentences added to a more dynamic sense and use of page space. Davies’s frequent lapses into Lancastrian dialect in print were perhaps a resistance to the specifically American influences in British sports writing but he was central to more general shifts in tone and style of sports writing towards the literary. McIlvanney was profoundly influenced by a generation of American writers, particularly boxing writers such as Bud Schulberg and the New Yorker’s AJ Liebling. The latter’s seminal book, The Sweet Science (1949) was gifted to the young writer at his first job on the Kilmarnock Standard. He said, ‘On the one hand, Liebling’s standards were liable to frighten the life out of me. On the other, the book confirmed that writing about sport could be worthwhile’ (McLaughlin, 2016, para. 13). Among the writers who can lay claim to influencing the changing face of British sports writing in the immediate post-WWII period, is Henry Rose, Davies’ closest contemporary. Sadly, Rose, was one of those, like Davies, who died in the Munich air disaster in 1958 which also claimed the lives of many of the Manchester United players who were known as the Busby Babes. His career started under the pseudonym ‘Taurus’, which he dropped in early 1931 (Dee, 2014, p. 431). His timing was exquisite. British sport was emerging from its relationship with amateur constraint and sporting purity (See Bolsmann & Porter, 2018). Prior to the exponential growth in consumption of, predominantly, radio and television media, newspapers had been established as the primary source of information in Britain. Rose began writing for The Daily Express, which with four million daily sales, was Britain’s most popular newspaper (Seymour-Ure, 1991, pp. 28–29). Rose’s work resonated so effectively with the newspaper readership he was offered a bi-weekly column, which soon became a daily feature (Dee, 2014). His short, snappy, highly personalised style was constructed on a carefully nurtured reputation for the controversial (Collins, 2008). In his report of the 1938 annual international match between England and Scotland international, he notes, ‘Five minutes after I had left the Wembley Stadium I had completely forgotten about the international’; and does not hold back, adding, ‘The worst international I have seen…for long stretches my notebook lay undisturbed, as were the two goalkeepers’ (Rose in Dee, 2014, p. 16).

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Rose’s success was founded on several factors: a willingness and ability to reflect his readers’ discussions and opinions (Collins, 2008); his capacity to leverage access to extensive industry networks, which afforded exclusive ‘insider’ insight that he could and would share with his readers; and an expert knowledge of the game that would see him regularly offer informed predictions. These factors aligned with the British public’s love of gambling and coincided with the growth of ‘the football pools’, a systematic scheme that allowed betting on a spread of football matches. Rose’s work would soon become essential reading for ‘punters’, those people playing the pools. The newspaper took advantage; adverts for ‘pools’ companies regularly appeared alongside his column (Dee, 2014, p. 434). Subsequently, Rose became ‘as popular as the people whose deeds he described’ (Collins, 2008, p. 28). He fast became a celebrity; his journey to national prominence could be seen to reflect the path of British sport toward modernisation and commercialisation. Geoffrey Green emerged as a football journalist in the early 1950s. His work was characterised by a canny combination of the strengths of Davies’ passion, erudition, and engaging football writing with Rose’s polished gift for and understanding of the value of ‘insider’ knowledge and the benefits of attentive curation of a public image. Coming from wealth and privilege, he had the family background, the confidence of elite society and the imprimatur of a Cambridge University education. Decades before the BBC dressed Italia 90 in opera, Nick Hornby produced Fever Pitch (1992), or Simon Kuper edited the literary football writing journal, Perfect Pitch: Home Ground (1997), Green determined that football journalism should not be relegated to the back pages of a newspaper and championed the game as high-brow cultural experience. In his 1950s campaign to shift football’s nominal position within its field of cultural production, he would produce the type of match report that satirists still mock today. For example, in response to the verbal challenges of a ballerina in a Madrid Club, Green (1985) would write: There is ballet in the movement of the players; music in the roar of the crowd—now fortissimo, now diminuendo. The field is a stage on which a play is acted. But in football you never know the ending. It can be different every time. (p. 101)

As a statement on football’s position as art and his own cultural credentials, it typified his work. In the same ways Rose did, Green made use of ‘insider’ insight and ‘celebrity’ status. He appeared to be familiar with every important European political, entertainment, and sporting figure of the day. His openly acknowledged drive toward literary standards, and a wish to have football writing accepted as such, would see him push out the boundaries. His masterful prose had an impressive influence on the public perception of football, particularly English football. More remarkable still was his ability, under deadline pressure, to dictate his articles free form over the phone to editors in London (Green, 1985). Known for his straightforward approach to commentary and reportage on every level of football, Brian Glanville is perhaps the most revered of all British football writers. His work, like Green’s, emerged in the 1950s. He was also driven to improve the cultural position of football and would go on to write about the game for over

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50 years in newspapers, magazines, and books—non-fiction and fiction (novels and short story collections). In 1950, aged 19, after persuading his father to pay for its publication, he wrote Arsenal icon Cliff Baston’s biography. This allowed Glanville to establish himself as a prodigious talent, experimenting with, and excelling in, most every kind of football writing (Hoey et al., 2022). He attained national recognition in the 1960s with an unmatched prolificacy for football reportage, literary output, and the documentation of world football’s most significant social and political changes. He attended and chronicled twelve World Cup tournaments. No other writer has been able to bring that depth of knowledge of the field or breadth of vision to football writing. An example that spans a cross section of Glanville’s writing qualities is illustrated in a piece he wrote the night before the 1979 FIFA World Cup second round match between hosts Argentina and their bitter rivals Brazil. After a visit with the famous Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Glanville (1978) noted: The Brazilian team goes through their muted gyrations, uncharacteristically limp and dull, I think how strange it is that these events on a soggy field in a little stadium, so tedious to the eye, will lead to such furore in Brazil – to anticarnivals, the burning of effigies, suicide, murder. (para. 12)

Recognition of the quality of the work of these writers’ efforts remained muted in British literary circles or outside of their readers, within their own industry. Their work was generally regarded as neither literary nor ‘real’ journalism until McIlvanney won the prestigious British Journalist of the Year award in 1976. He was the first— and only—sportswriter to achieve the respectability that Rose, Davies, Green and Glanville had sought. The next and final part of the chapter echoes the response to these writers’ works in offering more serious consideration of the ways football journalism is discussed. Before considering literary attributes in their writing, the next section provides some brief further background on Davies and McIlvanney.

Don Davies: “Not Only the Best of the Soccer Writers; He Was also Something of a Poet” Don Davies, Chief Football Correspondent at the (then Manchester) Guardian, writing as ‘An Old International’ (on weekends only), was most clearly and positively associated with ringing in changes in the form. Described as a writer ‘of considerable literary skill who brought to the genre of sports reporting a thoughtful, articulate and broadly philosophical approach’ (Goldlust cited in Boyle, 2006, p. 35), Davies was known and appreciated for a tendency toward the artful digression. Born in 1892, Davies was a Bolton Grammar School alumnus destined for the University of Manchester prior to WWI. Having joined the forces in 1916 he became a pilot in the Royal Flying Corp. Shot down over Northern France in 1917, it was as a prisoner of war that he studied languages and read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Cox, 1962). Davies weighed only six-and-a-half stones when

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he returned home, and after recuperation, he taught apprentices at Manchester engineering giant Mather and Plant, while studying for his degree in the evenings. He would rise to become principal of the school. From an early age he had developed a passion for the arts, classical music, theatre, poetry, and literature, often visiting the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester. His daughter Deirdre noted that his: Study walls were decorated with Durer prints, brought back from his footballing trips to Germany. On the mantelpiece were busts of Wagner and Beethoven. His bookshelves were as full of poetry books as of books on sport. Goethe, Heine and Schiller were his favourites. (Cox, 1962, p. 191)

Cox notes Davies’ ‘preoccupation with the arts’ was manifested in his love of Goethe and Heine (in the original German) and in his always carrying ‘a selection of Heine’s works in his pocket’ (Ibid., p. 13). These enthusiasms shaped his football writing (Williams, 2008) and his lively, poetic style brought him a sizable readership. His last ever report on 5 February 1958, the evening prior to the Munich air disaster, in which he was killed, captured the vibrant prose: Who would be a weather prophet? At Belgrade today, in warm sunshine and on a grass pitch where the last remnants of melting snow produced the effect of an English lawn flecked with daisies, Red Star Belgrade and Manchester United began a battle of wits and courage and rugged tackling. (Cox, 1962, p. 206)

Davies worked rhetorical devices, such as the rich contrast between the cool green landscape, the springtime perfection of the revered English lawn, and the heat of ‘battle’, into much of his work in chronicling the emergence of the ‘Busby Babes’. The ‘Babes’ were a group of prodigiously talented young Manchester United players who came to national prominence through the mid to late 1950s. They were named for the coach who trained them, Scotsman, Sir Matt Busby. The day after the noted Belgrade match, along with seven other journalists and seven Manchester United staff members, eight of those players died when their plane crashed at MunichRiem airport. At the memorial service, Davies’ eulogy underlined his writing and its literary description of football. His Manchester Guardian colleague, Neville Cardus remembered him as ‘something of a poet’ (Williams, 2018, para. 2). Davies’ standing in his community was reflected in colleague John Arlott’s obituary in the Manchester Guardian. Arlott was a household name for radio and television commentary; he had written for the London Evening News and described as the poet laureate of cricket for his lyrical articulation of play and players. To have Arlott write the obituary was a great honour. To add to the sorrow Davies had joyfully accepted Arlott’s seat on the doomed flight. As described in the introduction, Davies’ work was suffused with biblical, literary, musical, and popular culture references. He saw no separation between the workingclass spectacle of football and his own literary and cultural life. While his work for BBC radio, collected by Jack Cox, is markedly less literary in its outlook, his work for broadsheet newspaper, the Manchester Guardian, with its deeply radical left-wing history and readership, exploited the freedom he had to combine his passions. His influences are clear where he describes Hull City’s defender, William McCracken, as the ‘Irish Mephistopheles’; the reference to the demon in the Faustian myth is

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taken further when Davies adds that McCracken is ‘the game’s arch-obstructionist’ (Cox, 1962, p. 121). In a match report for a Manchester United Burnley fixture, an unlikely opportunity to reflect on humbled genuflection of the man credited with the construction of Babylon, Davies wrote, ‘at first we wondered whether Dawson, the centre-forward, had been modelling his training on Nebuchadnezzar, for he spent so much of his time on his hands and knees’ (Ibid., p. 139). The great Welsh all-rounder John Charles, as equally accomplished as a defender as he was a forward and a rare talent to succeed in Italy, is described by Davies as ‘the Admirable Crichton of the football world’ (Cox, 1962, p. 147). The reference draws on JM Barrie’s play The Admirable Crichton (1902), which was successfully adapted for the screen (Gilbert, 1957). Crichton is a butler who becomes the highly practical saviour of his marooned aristocratic employers in Lewis Gilbert’s comedy of manners. In another report, Davies notes the way Manchester United ‘danced’ onto ‘the pitch in their Tennysonian strip “clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful”, white stockings and all’ and adds wry humour, ‘One almost expected Robert Helpmann to emerge dribbling a ball’ (Cox, 1962, p. 159). The use of a quote from the famous Arthurian legend, Idylls of Kings (Tennyson, 2004) and the leading male dancer of the day sees Davies make the rare connection between narrative poetry and contemporaneous ballet in a football match report. His repertoire would also see him characterise Old Trafford as ‘“one vast substantial smile”’ as the jolly Mrs. Fezziwig from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (Cox, 1962, p. 162) and reference the opera (and perhaps his many visits to the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester) in his description of Argentinian midfield great Alfredo Di Stefano, whose colleagues, Davies noted could no more that be expected to revere and ‘play up to him’ than an ‘orchestra should play up to’ famous conductors such as impresario Sir Thomas Beecham or conductor and cellist, Sir John Barbirolli (Cox, 1962, p. 161). On Davies’s death there came an outpouring of grief from the football authorities, his peers, and his readers alike. Invoking the work of the great British writer and broadcaster, Mr E. Sutcliffe said, ‘this “Alistair Cooke” of the football world will be missed not only by those who cherish good football, but also those who cherish good writing’ (1958, para. 2). The Rev W. Winchurch noted Davies’, ‘classical allusions, quotations from Shakespeare, anecdotes, humorous examples of Lancashire dialect, as well as a perfect picture of the match and the players’, while Ada A. Cooke wrote: his genius for description made me see whatever was possible for an ignoramus to see in the game … It was as though I stood before a large picture and someone who understood it was showing me, with simplicity and sympathy, its inner meaning. (1958, para. 1)

Perhaps the most glowing tribute to Davies came from F. Jasper: We will miss that simile which made us smile all day, or a line of the classics which evoked such pleasant reflections. He could command in his service literature from the Old Testament to the nineteenth-century novelists. One recalls, for instance, his description of Finney’s rapier wit, cutting the Gordian knot of Manchester City’s defence. (1958, para. 3)

Intricate, insoluble problematic back fours aside, Davies’ highbrow approach to the relatively low brow world of football writing came as no surprise to friend John Heaton who wrote to the Guardian saying:

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Our friendship began through our common love of Oscar Wilde’s “De Profundis”. Mr Davies regarded that and Francis Thompson’s Essay on Shelley as the finest prose works in English Literature. I (and, I imagine thousands of others) regarded Mr. Davies’s prose as the best of all football writers.’ (Heaton, 1958, para. 1)

This ‘best of’ address would also be assigned to McIlvanney. While their similarities were many, there were differences in approach too. If Davies was judicious in his deployment of simile and literary allusion, McIlvanney latter did so with an immense sense of his own greatness and place as the most pre-eminent sportswriter of his age.

Hugh McIlvanney: A Trailblazer with Dazzling Imagery In addition to his Journalist of the Year award, McIlvanney would be awarded the sports writers prize on multiple occasions. Even as the precursors to what became known as New Journalism came to see the potential in the writer’s position at the centre of the tale, writers of the calibre of Norman Mailer, George Plimpton, and McIlvanney maintained a dignified distance from the events and stars being covered. He may have embodied the classic reporter in his writing, but McIlvanney’s reticence to implicate himself in the story did not stop him echoing the likes of Rose and Green. He cultivated the role of grand homme of British sports writing. As befitting someone who had a deep knowledge of boxing and horse racing, he created and nurtured a suave, urbane image in tailor-made suits, always puffing on a Cuban cigar. He was deeply aware of the power of his words. His safeguarding of his own brand was akin to auteur film directors maintaining their own unique style and standing. However, it was more than merely image, on his death obituaries emphasized that he was the man who did most to lift British sports journalism from the ‘fans with typewriters’ toyshop ghetto. Born in Kilmarnock in Ayrshire in 1934, McIlvanney came to serious sports writing via a very conventional route in post-war British journalism, beginning as a trainee reporter on his local paper. By the end of a career which had taken in the Daily Express, the Observer and the Sunday Times, he was described as “very probably the best writer ever to apply words to newsprint” (Randall, 2005, para. 17). Perhaps as a direct result of writing about favoured working-class pursuits of football, boxing, and horse-racing, he is still celebrated as a working-class hero. His own roots, the same working-class upbringing as those footballers and boxers he reported on enhanced his work and enabled a clear connection with the people he aimed to ‘speak’ to. When he wrote of Jock Stein that, ‘his was the kind of loyalty to his roots that made his principles universal’ (1997, p. 22), McIlvanney could have been writing about himself. McIlvanney’s writing was cultured, precise, and conveyed a deep understanding of football and other sports. He wrote in ways that had rarely been seen, even in the work of those noted previously. His renown can be credited to his unerring capacity to concisely address and articulate the essence of a given subject in a single sentence (Randall, 2005, para. 16), often through the employment of

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metaphor, wry humour, and startling imagery. The headline of his obituary in the Independent: ‘Hugh McIlvanney: A trailblazer whose dazzling imagery made him one of the greatest sports journalists’ (Shaw, 2019). Allied to this, he also had a talent for conveying the atmosphere of big sporting events, such as a FIFA World Cup, where he illustrated a keen eye for that which took place away from the pitch, in the crowd or the press box. On the occasion of Celtic’s ground-breaking 1967 European Cup Final win, McIlvanney chose to open his match report with, ‘today Lisbon is almost, but not quite, back in Portuguese hands at the end of the most hysterically exuberant occupation any city has ever known’ and that ‘at the airport the impression is of a Dunkirk with happiness’ (McIlvanney, 1997, p. 17). Like his predecessors, he developed lasting friendships with sports stars of huge significance, football managers Bill Shankly (who he dubbed a ‘warrior poet’), Matt Busby, Stein, and the footballer George Best among them. Best, the Northern Irish winger who spent most of his career at Manchester United, is still regarded by many as the greatest player who ever lived, including Pele, the player most often given the label (before the emergence of Messi and Ronaldo and the label’s flagrant mis- and overuse). McIlvanney’s use of language does not speak simply to a description of a footballer in action: With feet as sensitive as a pick-pocket’s hands, his control of the ball under the most violent pressure was hypnotic. The bewildering repertoire of feints and swerves, sudden stops and demoralising spurts, exploited a freakish elasticity of limb and torso, tremendous physical strength and resilience for so slight a figure and balance that would have made Isaac Newton decide he might as well have eaten the apple. (1997, p. 89)

The first few words ascribing Best’s feet with exceptional skill, lightness of touch, and the surreptitious dexterity of a cunning thief’s fingers are a now famous, oftquoted simile. However, the comparative intertextual allusion to epiphanic work of English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, and author Sir Isaac Newton (another master of his craft) is arguably the more powerful image. Best’s apparent defiance of the physicist’s laws speaks simultaneously to his mercurial footballing abilities and his rebellious persona off the pitch. At a syllabic level, McIlvanney’s sentences dance the way the player did. The writer employs a range of alliterative devices to capture Best’s gifts. Plosives (pressure–hypnotic, exploited-freakishelasticity) are interspersed with consonant sibilance, specifically the alliterative repetition of hard t sounds known as a ‘dental’ consonance (torso–tremendous). Instances of sibilance, the alliterative ‘s’ sound (swerves, sudden stops, demoralising spurts; (re)silience for so slight) are interwoven with assonant vowel sounds (control, most violent, hypnotic) to present movement akin to the push and pull of breath, the touch and tap of a ball. Rather than simply noting the action, these sounds resonate, imitate Best’s evasion of his opponent, the physical action being described. Then there is the protracted approximate of polysyndeton in the second sentence, ‘feints and swerves … stops and demoralising spurts, … limb and torso … strength and resilience’. The repetition of paired verbs, nouns, and then adjectives enact the gravity defying balance, show the player through a series of images and devices that share the relationship with the weight-less illusion, a break with the real and concrete. The reader

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is moved by the words even as Best’s poor opponents were dumbfounded by his footwork. McIlvanney was arguably the last of his kind, he extended a working-class respect for the sport and treated it with the same verbose reverence of the ordinary fan on the terrace. Rather than let football journalism be diminished or positioned as a profession, he, like Davies before him, sought to imbue his love and respect for the game through his writing. His world view and career seemed preoccupied by why people, particularly the working classes, are so preternaturally attached to sport and sporting figures as a means of identification and enjoyment. For McIlvanney those people involved in this relationship, the great players and managers, deserved to be elevated to the same standing culturally as the great historic figures, a paradox given his belief and description of sport as ‘our magnificent triviality’ (Mitchell, 2016, para. 1), but for him, Busby and his fellow Scottish football management trailblazers, Stein and the great Bill Shankly, embodied the greatness and drama of Shakespearean figures like Brutus or Caesar. The story of Best, whose unfulfilled talent would come to symbolise so much about British culture, is a symbolic picture of decline, a tragedy in all its classical form.

Conclusion At their deaths, Davies in 1958 and McIlvanney in 2019, the outpouring of grief reflected more than just their standing as leading practitioners of their art in their respective eras. A remarkable feature of the published obituaries, and in Davies’ case the incredible letters from his readership, is the frequent use of examples from their works and references to their stylistic approach and their consistent and seemingly relentless capacity to capture extraordinary human endeavour in the most compelling ways. Unlike Davies, McIlvanney worked at a time where he was not confined by the constrictions of the match report or preview. He would often find the space to set sport and sporting figures in much deeper social and political contexts. He was at his best estimating the cultural and historical worth of his chosen sports and their leading, triumphant, and often broken figures. He knew, like Davies, that sport reveals those truths that other aspects of everyday life cannot. Their part in the evolution and elevation of football writing and its journalism is evident in their use of more expressive narrative elements, the rhetorical and literary devices a reader would be more likely to find in a work of literary fiction. Taking just a small number of examples we better understand their influence on football journalism and realise their attainment, and more, of their goal to make football writing worthy of literary consideration. We do not argue for wholesale equitable consideration on a par with more prestigious forms of journalism. Rather this chapter argues that, alongside a handful of notable others, McIlvanney, the last of his kind, and Davies, the likely progenitor of narrative voice, allusion, and complex metaphor in football reporting, innovated the form and in doing so reframed the intent of sports

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journalism and re-situated the game within our cultural understanding. They made it too difficult for their work, and that of their peers, to be dismissed and relegated to the back pages.

References Belsey, C. (2013). Textual analysis as a research method. In G. Griffin (Ed.), Research methods for English studies (2nd ed., pp. 160–178). Edinburgh University Press. Bolsmann, C., & Porter, D. (2018). English gentlemen and world soccer: Corinthians, amateurism and the global game. Routledge. Boyle, R. (2006). Sports journalism: Context and issues. Sage. Brewster, B. (1993). ‘When Saturday comes’ and other football fanzines. Sports Historian, 13(1), 14–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/17460269309446374 Collins, P. (2008). In a different league. British Journalism Review, 19(2), 25–31. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0956474808094196 Cooke, A. A. (1958, February 10). Letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian. John Rylands Library Guardian Collection. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manche ster~12~12~1525~244907?qvq=q:Davies&mi=63&trs=247 Cox, J. (1962). Don Davies: ‘An old international.’ Stanley Paul. Dee, D. (2014). “Personality and color into everything he does”: Henry Rose (1899–1958)—Journalist, celebrity, and the forgotten man of the Munich disaster. Journal of Sport History, 41(3), 425–445. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/566618. Dixon, K. (2020). Demand and the reduction of consumer power in English football: A historical case-study of Newcastle United fanzine, the mag 1988–1999. Soccer and Society, 21(1), 96–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.2018.1508020 Fishwick, N. (1989). English football and society 1910–1950. Manchester University Press. Gilbert, L. (1957). The admirable Crichton. Modern Screen Play. Giulianotti, R. (2002). Supporters, followers, fans, and flaneurs: A taxonomy of spectator identities in football. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 26(1), 25–46. Glanville, B. (1978, June 12). World cup soccer. The Washington Post. https://www.washingto npost.com/archive/lifestyle/1978/06/12/world-cup-soccer-madness-in-argentina/0f5d0d4e7765-46d2-8e27-58425b69a0e0/ Green, G. (1992). The match of the century—I. In I. Hamilton (Ed.), The Faber book of soccer (pp. 65–68). Faber and Faber (Original work published 1953). Green, G. (1985). Pardon me for living. George Allen & Unwin. Hartley, J. (1999). Housing television: A fridge, a film and social democracy. In J. Hartley (Ed.), Uses of television (pp. 92–111). Routledge. Haynes, R. (1995). The football imagination: The rise of football fanzine culture. Arena. Heaton, J. (1958, February 17). Letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian. John Rylands Library Guardian Collection. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manche ster~12~12~1568~245132?qvq=q:Heaton%20Davies&mi=0&trs=3 Hill, J. (2002). Sport, leisure and culture in twentieth century Britain. Palgrave. Hoey, P., McGowan, L. and Forrest, D. (2022). Subverting the inverted pyramid: Kevin McCarra and the revolution in British football journalism 1988–2020. TEXT, 26(Special 67), 1–17. https:// doi.org/10.52086/001c.37826 Hornby, N. (1992). Fever pitch. Victor Gollancz. Jasper, F. (1958, February 9). Letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian. John Rylands Library Guardian Collection. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manchester~12~12~148 6~244940?qvq=q:Davies&mi=130&trs=247 Keeble, R. (2006). The newspapers handbook. Routledge.

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Kuper, S. (Ed.) (1997). Perfect pitch: The best new writing on football. Home Ground. Headline. Mason, T. (1993). All the winners and the half times. Sports Historian, 13(1), 3–13. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/17460269309446373 McGowan, L. (2019). Football in fiction: A history. Routledge. McIlvanney, H. (1997). McIlvanney on football. Mainstream Publishing. McIlvanney, H. (2019, January 20). George Best: ‘If I had been born ugly, you would never have heard of Pele’. The Sunday Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/george-best-if-i-had-beenborn-ugly-you-would-never-have-heard-of-pele-05rbhfljl McKee, A. (2003). Textual analysis: A beginner’s guide. Sage. McLaughlin, M. (2016, March 2). End of an era as Hugh McIlvanney retires. The Scotsman. https://www.scotsman.com/sport/football/martyn-mclaughlin-end-era-hugh-mcilva nney-retires-1481587 Millward, P. (2008). The rebirth of the football fanzine: Using e-zines as data source. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 32(3), 299–310. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723508319718 Mitchell, K. (2016, March 5). Hugh McIlvanney has been the master craftsman of our magnificent triviality. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/mar/05/hugh-mcilva nney-sport-writer-retires-observer-sunday-times-boxing-horse-racing Pearson, H. (2019, May 19). Hugh McIlvanney, Eric Batty and football writing’s deep divide. When Saturday Comes (Issue 386). https://www.wsc.co.uk/stories/14220-harry-pearson-col umn-hugh-mcilvanney-eric-batty-and-football-writing-s-deep-divide Randall, D. (2005, September 12). The greatest reporters. Independent. https://www.independent. co.uk/news/media/the-greatest-reporters-5347788.html Rowe, D. (2005). Fourth estate or fan club? Sports journalism engages the popular. In S. Allen (ed.) Journalism: Critical Issues (pp. 125–136) Open University Press. Rowe, D. (2007). Sports journalism: Still the toy department’ of the news media? Journalism, 8(4), 385–405. Scanlan, C. (2003). Writing from the top down: Pros and cons of the inverted pyramid. Poynter. https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2003/writing-from-the-top-downpros-and-cons-of-the-inverted-pyramid Shakespeare, W. (2003). Julius Caesar. Opensourceshakespeare.com (Original work published 1599). https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/playmenu.php?WorkID=julius caesar Seymour-Ure, C. (1991). The British press and broadcasting since 1945. Blackwell. Shaw, P. (2019, January 25). Hugh McIlvanney: A trailblazer whose dazzling imagery made him one of the greatest sports journalist. Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ hugh-mcilvanney-obituary-sports-journalism-george-best-muhammad-ali-pele-a8746056.html Sutcliffe, E. (1958, February 7). Letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian. John Rylands Library Guardian Collection. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manche ster~12~12~1413~244995?qvq=q:Davies&mi=4&trs=247 Tennyson, A. (2004). Idylls of kings. Courier Corporation (Original work published 1859). Walvin, J. (2014). The people’s game: the history of football revisited. Random House (Original work published 1975). Williams, R. (2008, February 3). Presses stopped in Manchester as Guardian man confirmed dead. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2008/feb/02/newsstory.mancheste runited2 Williams, R. (2018, February 6). Donny Davies, the Guardian correspondent who died in the Munich air disaster. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/football/2018/feb/05/munich-air-dis aster-donny-davies-guardian-football-correspondent-died Winchurch, Rev. W. (1958, February 7). Letter to the editor of the Manchester Guardian. John Rylands Library Guardian Collection. https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/servlet/detail/Manche ster~12~12~1435~244974?qvq=q:Winchurch&mi=0&trs=2%27

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Dr Paddy Hoey is a Senior Lecturer in Media, Culture & Communications with IR & Politics at Liverpool John Moores University. He has written widely on activist media and politics, political activism, and football. He is the author of Shinners, Dissos and Dissenters: Irish republican media activism since the Good Friday Agreement (2018) for Manchester University Press. Prior to working in the university sector he was a subeditor and sports reporter on national and regional newspaper titles on Merseyside, including the Liverpool Echo and the Liverpool Daily Post. Dr Lee McGowan is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast. His primary research interests are in the intersections of sport, creative writing and community engagement. As a practitioner researcher, Lee has a keen interest in community stories, in their telling and their presentation. He produces sole and co-authored traditional and non-traditional research outputs. His publications include books, journal articles, book chapters, a digital history, a touring exhibition, fiction, creative non-fiction and locative literature.

Notes on a Scandal: Lemon and Haigh on Australian cricket’s ‘Sandpapergate’ Elizabeth Ellison

Abstract In 2018, a young Australian cricketer named Cameron Bancroft was caught on television broadcast shoving what would later emerge to be sandpaper down his white trousers. It was the start of a frenzied public and media storm that culminated in the suspension of three players, the resignation of the head coach, and commissioned reviews into the sport’s national peak body. Later that year, two long-form books were published: Gideon Haigh’s Crossing the line: how Australian cricket lost its way and Geoff Lemon’s Steve Smith’s Men: behind Australian cricket’s downfall. This chapter examines these two texts as examples of cricket writing— considering the authors’ approach; their writing styles; and the thematic interpretations they present. Haigh’s is a comprehensive chronology, supported by a rigorous analysis of secondary data, whereas Lemon’s close position as a travelling journalist with the team allows him to represent himself within his book. While Lemon’s work is more character driven, both are equally damning of the systemic problems embedded within Cricket Australia. As cricket texts, they reveal the power of long-form work and techniques that make meaning from an intense, unwieldly moment in Australian men’s cricket. Keywords Sports writing · Cricket · Australian cricket team · Gideon Haigh · Geoff Lemon

Introduction November 19, 2021, just over two weeks before the 2021/22 Ashes cricket series between Australia and England was due to begin, the highly-regarded Tim Paine unexpectedly resigned from the Australian men’s captaincy. Played surprisingly regularly every two years, the Ashes series remains a marquee event of the international cricket calendar for Australia and England. The two countries wield immense E. Ellison (B) Central Queensland University, Noosaville, QLD, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_4

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influence within the sport’s peak body, the International Cricket Council (ICC); in conjunction with India, they form what is colloquially known as ‘the big three’. As such, Paine’s sudden resignation made global headlines. The resultant media coverage was polarising and somewhat salacious: Paine resigned after being informed that explicit text messages sent to a former female colleague would be made public (Hytner, 2021). It was a stark fall from grace for a man who brought stability in what could be considered a period of great crisis. In March 2018, Paine was appointed captain after Cricket Australia1 banned Steven Smith from playing international and domestic Australian cricket for 12 months. Paine was seen by many to be an anchor in the storm—a player who focused on the ‘spirit of the game’ rather than winning at all costs. For him to be revealed as a flawed individual tarred with speculation related to sexual harassment appeared to close the loop on an era of discomfort and uncertainty for Cricket Australia and its international men’s team. December 9, 2021, the (as yet) scandal free and exceptionally talented fast bowler, Patrick Cummins, led the Australian men’s team to a resounding win in the opening test match played in Brisbane. It was lauded as the beginning of a new era. Instead, a brush with COVID19 enforced quarantine and vice-captain Steve Smith donned the captain’s blazer in the second test in Adelaide; the first time since being removed and banned from playing in 2018. The media response was swift, including headlines like: ‘Blown back to the future: the loved-loathed Smith thrust back into the spotlight’ (Baum, 2021). Smith’s return was not triumphant or legendary, rather it facilitated the return of ‘Sandpapergate2 ’ to the national consciousness and instigated this consideration of contemporaneous creative writing that emerged at and underlined intersections of sport and society. March 24, 2018, during a test match played in Cape Town, South Africa, Australian cricket player Cameron Bancroft was caught by television cameras handling sandpaper, a banned substance on the cricket field. This gave immediate rise to the allegation—swiftly upheld once Bancroft finally admitted to it—of ball tampering, the use of sandpaper to affect the shape of the cricket ball to impact its performance. Captain Steven Smith and vice-captain David Warner, in conjunction with Bancroft, confessed to being involved in the decision to use sandpaper. All three were handed punishments by Cricket Australia: Bancroft was suspended from playing international and domestic cricket in Australia for nine months; and Smith and David Warner were sanctioned for 12 months.3 Almost immediately, in the furore of media attention, it became known as Sandpapergate. The incident itself has been extensively reported and detailed (see Brettig, 2021; Chiu, 2018; Kimber, 1

The national governing body of cricket in Australia. At the time of the incident in 2018, the CEO was James Sutherland. He has since been replaced. 2 Both ‘Sandpapergate’ and ‘Sandpaper-gate’ has been used in writing about this particular incident. For this chapter, I will use ‘Sandpapergate’. 3 Bancroft and Smith were required to wait for 12 months after their bans to be considered for leadership positions. David Warner will never again be able to take a leadership position for domestic or international Australian cricket.

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2019; Mercer, 2018 as just some examples). However, as noted above, the ramifications and implications continue to reverberate across national and international cricketing communities. This chapter focuses on the responses of two prominent white Australian cricket journalists and writers, which were published later in 2018. Gideon Haigh’s Crossing the line: how Australian cricket lost its way and Geoff Lemon’s Steve Smith’s Men: behind Australian cricket’s fall would be described as long form creative non-fiction works of sports writing related to international cricket. These books consider the same significant incident of remarkable and unexpected controversy, but they take divergent approaches to their review and evaluation. Haigh positions his text as something of a cultural review, leaning on his journalistic training to interview (off the record) over 50 people and then use the results to draw out a range of narrative threads. Lemon, a published poet, was on tour with the Australian cricket team in South Africa at the time. His book offers a broader and at times more intimate analysis of the culture, the characters, the context, and those events that led to and emerged out of the Cape Town test. Before the discussion takes place, it is important to note distinctions between their contribution to Australian sports, particularly cricket writing. Haigh is the elder of the two and is often celebrated for his erudition and insight on Australian cricket, business, and crime. Currently, Haigh is an ongoing contributor to The Australian as senior cricket writer. He is an incredibly prolific, primarily non-fiction writer: since Crossing the Line was published in 2018, he has published seven books, including three focused on cricket. Among his works are two cricket biographies; The Big Ship (2001) of cricketer Warwick Armstrong and Mystery Spinner (1999) of Jack Iverson. He hosts the cricket podcast Cricket, Et Cetera with fellow cricket writer, Peter Lalor, and occasionally contributes cricket commentary. Lemon is a journalist and writer who began focusing on cricket writing in 2010. His previously published works were fiction and poetry. Lemon is an active cricket commentator—primarily on radio— and hosts the cricket podcast The Final Word with fellow Australian commentator Adam Collins. Since Steve Smith’s Men, Lemon has written The Comeback Summer (2020), which traces the reputational recovery of Steve Smith and English cricketer Ben Stokes. This chapter contextualises the landscape of cricket writing. Then, using textual analysis, a comparison is drawn between the texts across three concepts: the approach each author took to their writing of the books; the use of poetics within the writing styles; and thematic interpretations of the texts. It is not exceptionally valuable to identify the more successful of the two, or which marker of success would most effectively do so. Both texts are carefully crafted, rigorously researched, and ultimately damning in their reading of the systemic issues at play in this specific timestamp on modern Australian cricket. Although both Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men draw similar conclusions and cover similar territory, each book has particular elements worth examining in order to understand how texts like these help us make sense of the barrage of media around a national story that blurred the boundaries between news and sports news in March of 2018.

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Contextual Review Cricket Writing Sports, as Rob Steen outlines in his chapter, Why sports journalism matters (2020), has an ability to permeate the national conversation. Discussing the 2019 cricket match between England and Australia at Headingly, known for its record-breaking result in which England’s Ben Stokes unexpectedly and nearly single-handedly won the game, Steen recounts the most pressing concerns dominating news reporting at the time. Yet, as he notes, ‘Nothing, though, could stop each and every one of Monday’s nine daily national newspapers leading their front pages with a photograph of Stokes at the moment of victory, arms at ten-past-ten, roaring his delight. Even the Financial Times’ (2020, p. 3). However, journalism related to cricket is but one arm of a somewhat niche but rich collection of writing on the sport. Cricket—at least at the time of writing—remains a primarily internationally focused sport in which national teams retain importance over individual players. There are three major formats of cricket: test cricket (played over four to five days and consisting of four innings that are not time-bound); one day cricket (popularised in the 1970s, played in a single day with each team facing an innings no greater than 50 overs); and Twenty20 (T20) cricket (similar to one day cricket, but each team faces only 20 overs—these games usually run between two and four hours).4 Importantly, cricket retains its dominance primarily in the Commonwealth in countries that are former or remain English territories (such as Australia, India, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, South Africa, and so on). As such, the sport still has a complex racial and political colonial history (Dixit, 2018). Academic writing on cricket tends to approach the sport as a site of society and culture—for instance, examining the gender or racial representations within various teams or sports coverage (see Gemmell, 2007; Nicholson, 2015, 2019), or the celebrity and popular culture of cricket (see Nalapat & Parker, 2005). There is a host of academic writing on the mechanics of the sport, such as the physiological requirements for playing (Noakes & Durandt, 2000); ways to prevent injuries (Finch et al., 1999); or even effective leadership behaviours in cricket (Smith et al., 2017). However, as with many academic disciplines, there is often little crossover from academic literature into mainstream discussion. Commercial or trade publications can be broadly grouped into a small number of categories: books written by current or past players, usually in the form of autobiographies; those books written by others about players, predominantly biographies; non-fiction examinations of particular issues or moments of time; those rarer cricket themed memoirs; and cricket fiction. Most of these categories are self-explanatory.

4

In 2020, the English Cricket Board introduced a new short format of the game called The Hundred, in which each team faces 100 balls. It is similar to Twenty20 cricket in style and length but remains its own format.

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The following outlines these broad categories and shares some examples of each type, although this is not intended to be a comprehensive list. The player autobiography is an incredibly popular form in sports publishing broadly and cricket is no exception. These books, often ghost written, regularly feature a striking photo of the player as the cover and tell the story of their playing career—sometimes during or after their career has finished. Shane Warne’s No Spin (2020), co-written with Mark Nicholas, written and published before his untimely death in 2022 is a popular example of arguably one of the most internationally known cricket players. However, there are many examples in this category: Pakistan’s fast bowler Wasim Akram’s Sultan: a memoir (co-written with Haigh and due for release in 2022), Australian all-rounder Ellyse Perry’s Perspective (2019), and former English captain Nassar Hussain’s Playing with Fire: the autobiography (2004) are merely a small representation of one of the most popular forms of sports writing. Player biographies are similarly character focused, although sometimes with more opportunity to delve into the controversies surrounding players than those often image-cleanser stories the subjects tell about themselves. For instance, David Tossell’s Tony Greig: a reappraisal of English cricket’s most controversial captain (2018), or Gideon Haigh’s On Warne (2012). They may tell a story clearly still unfinished—such as the recently released Captain Pat: cometh the hour, Cummins the man (Reed, 2022), an examination of the current and still emerging Australian captain. Regularly—but not always—penned by journalists, these biographies examine the public record (and beyond) to extrapolate a fuller picture of the players. A critically acclaimed example is David Frith’s Archie Jackson: cricket’s tragic genius (initially published in 1974, updated and re-released in 2020), which tells the story of a young talent touted to be an enormous contributor to the sport before he died from tuberculous at 23 years of age. There is also a significant collection of non-fiction texts that examine a particular issue, format, or historical period. Similar to other sports, cricket has produced a great number of specific investigations into noteworthy contexts and competitions within the game. The recently released Crickonomics: the anatomy of modern cricket (Szymanski & Wigmore, 2022) combines sports economics with cricket to consider the current state of the game and future possibilities. One of the authors, Tim Wigmore, has done similarly with his text Cricket 2.0 (written with Freddie Wilde, 2019) in which they interviewed players and coaches to capture the rise of the short form Twenty20 cricket and its significant impact on the global game. Another rigorously researched offering is Daniel Brettig’s Whitewash to Whitewash: Australian cricket’s years of struggle and summer of riches (2015), which traces the Australian cricket test team between two ‘whitewash’ (5–0) victories against England in 2006/ 07 and again in 2013/14. Brettig’s account of this period in Australian cricket offers valuable insight on cricket culture at the national level prior to Sandpapergate in 2018 and is worthy of further research in the wake of the scandal. An important distinction must be made between those non-fiction examinations and cricket themed memoirs. While often written by journalists or people in the public eye, these memoirs are not intended to be a definitive account of a particular moment, series, or historical era of the game of cricket. Instead, they function as Brien suggests:

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‘usually explor[ing] only one theme, period or aspect of a life under consideration’ (2004, p. 84). In these examples, cricket becomes a type of organisational theme for the narrative. Felix White, a cricket podcaster and writer as well as member of British rock band, ‘The Maccabees’, uses cricket as the lynchpin of his memoir It’s Always Summer Somewhere (2022). It presents a way of making meaning for White, which is not dissimilar to Adam Zwar’s approach in his text, Twelve Summers (2021). Zwar, an Australian actor, writer, and producer, uses cricket as the grounding mechanism for integral moments in his life. Emma John, author of Following On: a memoir of teenage obsession and terrible cricket (2016), is now a cricket journalist and the memoir traces the beginnings of her love for the game. Jeffrey Hill, a leading scholar in fiction related to sports captures a history of cricket fiction, initially dominated by English voices and perspectives (2012). Importantly, he identifies what can be considered generic qualities of the writing and suggests that cricket fiction, in comparison to the game itself, ‘has been more resistant to nostalgia, more willing to explore the new conditions in which cricket has found itself’ (2012, p. 187). Questions remain about what makes a ‘cricket novel’. Hill points to Malcolm Knox’s Adult Book (2004) and Romesh Gunesekera’s The Match (2008) as using cricket symbolically—representing departures from the traditional cricket writing of the late 1800s, which focused more on the game as a plot device. Overall, cricket writing—like many disciplines of sports writing—can be incredibly prolific. A focus on currency and a reliance on sports writers or journalists means commercial cricket writing can set, inform and or influence the tone for interpreting, understanding, and re-telling of the dominant narratives of cricket’s key moments. We see this play out explicitly in the aftermath of Sandpapergate in the immediacy of the news coverage around the event and the publication of both Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men prior to the release of Cricket Australia’s own formal report (Baum, 2018). The speed in which both texts were published is remarkable in itself. Comparatively, academic literature on Sandpapergate remains—by design of the academic publishing market—slower to move.

Writing on Sandpapergate There has, however, been an array of perspectives positioned in the relevant academic literature to date. For instance, Sai Krishna Tikka and Shobit Garg (2018) discussed the psychology of cheating and the confessions and apologies offered by the three players involved. Sam Duncan and Ian Glenn (2020) examined the role of social media and local Afrikaans broadcast commentary in contributing to, generating, and ultimately shaping ‘the overall narrative and tone around the issue, both online and in the discussions emanating from mainstream traditional news outlets in Australia and South Africa’ (p. 301). Lynley Ingerson and Michael Naraine (2019) considered the incident from a human resource management perspective, using a fabricated case study of the appointment of an Integrity Manager (IM) in the aftermath of Sandpapergate, where the case study’s fictional IM, Patrick Murphy, examines

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significant issues within Cricket Australia (for instance, with staffing, diversity, and player issues). John Hughson and Marina Hughson (2021) examine the incident through a lens of transnational masculinity, considering how the players became part of an organisational network comfortable with ‘ethically questionable conduct’ (2021, p. 1388). A key component of the literature—both academic and within the media—is the cultural framework in which the Australian men’s cricket team sits, and the frankly cruel, abusive behaviour that appeared to characterise it. Australian journalist Jarrod Kimber, reflecting on the incident the year after, suggested ‘Australian cricket has always been synonymous with bad behaviour. It’s a brand, or even a badge of honour’ (2019, para. 101). This is a focus of Hughson and Hughson’s (2021) article as well, noting: It was Sandpapergate’s seeming confirmation of this historically embedded national reputation that is likely to have raised public anger in Australia to such a high level. Behaving boisterously off the field and flouting conventions and accepted playing styles during the game is one thing but being exposed as cheats evoked a distinctly Australian sentiment of ‘it’s not cricket’. (p. 1395)

The scale of the incident was remarkable in an Australian context. The history and precedence of ball tampering in cricket has never generated such a response, both in terms of the public outcry and the penalties enforced by the country’s governing body. The immediate aftermath was significant for the national sport and its impact continues to be felt nearly five years later. As such, an examination of Haigh and Lemon’s texts—while differing in approach although similarly timed—reveals both authors lacked the ability to forecast the continually surprising turns of the Australian men’s cricket team. Lemon’s final lines of the penultimate chapter, however, reveal a finely tuned instinct: ‘At the time of writing, Australia has a decent man as captain. The question is how long he’ll be allowed to continue being either’ (p. 284). The answer, as we now know, is approximately three years and eight months. And the end of both was simultaneous.

Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men: Comparing Haigh and Lemon While Geoff Lemon and Gideon Haigh are firmly linked with cricket in Australia, their careers have not followed precisely the same path. Haigh, a journalist of over 30 years, spent time on staff at The Age, The Independent Monthly, and The Australian. Most recently he has worked freelance for major publications around the world, and now co-hosts the aforementioned cricket podcast. Lemon is comparatively newer to cricket writing (although with over ten years of experience), and his work emerged initially in independent publications. Lemon, with frequent collaborator Adam Collins, personally secured the rights to broadcast commentary of the Australia – Sri Lanka test series in 2016 after no Australian media outlet committed

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to purchasing them (Williams, 2019). This type of unorthodox approach to the game means Lemon has appeared willing to ask questions of what could be considered the game’s ‘establishment’, as evidenced in his piece in The Guardian critiquing the commentary team of the then national broadcast television partner (Lemon, 2015).

Approaching the Topic Crossing the Line was published in late 2018, less than eight months after Sandpapergate. While Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men cover similar territory—how could they not, considering the significance of the event in Australian cricket—the texts take a very different approach. The advertising spiel suggested Haigh’s review is cheaper and quicker compared to the then incomplete review commissioned by Cricket Australia, and yet Crossing the Line remains rigorous and detailed. Indeed, Greg Baum argues that it is more ‘erudite’ (2018, para. 2). Haigh interviewed at least 50 players, ex-players, and officials connected with cricket and Cricket Australia on a ‘not for attribution’ basis, as one might expect of a long-serving journalist. Haigh notes how difficult it is to expect someone to go on the record perhaps in opposition of the sole promoter and employer of international cricket in Australia. Initially, Haigh walks the reader through a brief historical context in the first chapter, establishing key principles and people that will continue to contribute to the situation at hand. Importantly, Haigh has extensively reviewed and refers to corporate documents such as the Argus Review.5 His text is written by someone with incredibly detailed in-depth knowledge of cricket policy and corporate administration and written in an accessible tone that belies this subject. He covers much territory, including brief discussions of crucial points about the international cricket landscape, the role of cricket boards in India and England, and the changing staffing structures and portfolios of Cricket Australia. With few exceptions, however, Haigh does not dwell on the action that occurs on the cricket field or with many of the personalities on it. In comparison, in Steve Smith’s Men, Lemon transports the reader into the moments, the emotions, the relationships, and the characters of this saga. By chapter two, the reader has already spent more time on the cricket pitch than in the entirety of Haigh’s text (pp. 1–2, 6–7); supported by his inclusion within the travelling Australian media cohort who were present in South Africa during the incident. Crucially, lacking the formal journalistic training that characterises Haigh’s approach, Lemon himself is an integral part of the book. While embedding direct quotations throughout— especially those of fellow cricket writers—Lemon’s own voice is essential to the 5

The Argus Review was commissioned by Cricket Australia in 2011 in the wake of an Ashes defeat against England and a poor world Test ranking. Or, as David Lord (2011) suggested: “what’s wrong with Australian cricket?” The Argus Review took over nine months and was the subject of scrutiny because of its claim to be an independent investigation while including three former Australian Test captains as well as a former CEO of Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council. The Review encouraged sweeping changes, such as the inclusion of a head coach role with team selection responsibility.

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telling of the narrative. This allows him to be more personal, more present when describing the key moments of the time before and after the game in Cape Town. This personal approach can be revealing at times, like when Lemon discusses the ‘imposter syndrome’ which he faced while reporting: ‘suddenly the handful of us [journalists]… were world experts in aerodynamics and laminar flow, the history of relative ethics, and the psychology both macro and micro of the entire Australian national project as well as each individual cricketer’ (p. 174). Yet, Steve Smith’s Men remains supported by characters beyond Lemon. He too undertook journalistic research in the crafting of the book, mentioning his interviewees at times (p. 186). However, in the opening lines of chapter three, Lemon is quick to confirm that ‘this book is not a detective story’ (p. 13). The comprehensive history, he suggests, will have to wait until careers have finished.

Writing Styles While Haigh and Lemon both identify major concerns with the upper echelons of Cricket Australia’s management and raise questions about the role of a ‘win at all costs’ mentality that can be found implied within the policy and practices within the organisation, these two texts diverge most in terms of writing style. This is unsurprising; Lemon is a published poet. There is also, of course, a different tone and intention to the works. Haigh is fundamentally a proficient and excellent journalist: Crossing the Line is at its strongest where it carefully unravels crucial threads. Consider, for instance, the almost devastating intent of a line like: ‘but through 2017, CA seemed perfectly content with having their most valuable assets depicted as overpaid prima donnas’ (Haigh, 2018, p. 154). As noted earlier, Haigh’s skill is making policy accessible and in Crossing the Line he is able to effectively reveal the limitations of administrative policies and its impact on the game. For instance, when discussing the Argus Review, Haigh notes its (limited) potential strengths: ‘It is scattered, too, with thoughtful ideas … correctly foresaw some problems now widely diagnosed, and urged action that was not really taken’ (2018, p. 54). But, importantly, he distils the major flaws of the internal review as a ‘corporate manifesto’ (2018, p. 54) with jargon, abbreviations, unclear implementation strategies, and a range of redundancies. While Lemon’s most powerful lines are also deceptively simple, they are effective because of the book’s more evident ‘craft’. Consider, for example, the segment in the latter sections of the book in which Lemon analyses what he describes as the ‘Good Bloke Doctrine’ of former Australian coach Darren Lehmann, specifically in regard to national team player selection. A section of eight paragraphs build his case, sharply but convincingly detailing a timeline of certain unfavourable players being cast aside for reasons quite apart from their cricketing ability, such as: ‘[Ed] Cowan was the Test opener when Lehmann took over, but he wrote books and liked [previous coach] Mickey Arthur. He got one more match’ (2018, p. 249). The pace increases, the tone tightens, until in the final paragraph Lemon locks onto his target: this is not just a

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people problem. Although the people are part of the problem, it’s a systemic issue of Cricket Australia. Their own policy review identified that it was important that players earned their way into the team. Lemon’s final line, then, becomes a hammer blow: ‘In no way, in no form, has that policy been honoured in the Australian cricket team since’ (2018, p. 251). Both texts are written in that favoured style of much sports writing: active, present tense with a sense of momentum as we escalate towards the precipice. Crossing the Line begins with the moment on field in its Introduction before delving back into history to provide context for the contemporary state of the game. Steve Smith’s Men instead positions Steve Smith himself as one anchor in the text—travelling from his extreme high of scoring a century in 2017 in Brisbane to the extreme lows of the harried media appearances in the days after his team member was caught tampering with the cricket ball. Lemon’s prose is, at times, more fanciful, revealing a writer who enjoys evoking imagery with words and with an undercurrent of humour throughout. Consider, for instance, the opening of chapter eight in which Lemon revels in the absurdity that he terms ‘pitch talk’: Curators are alchemists, commentators are astrologers: the former meld arcane physical ingredient with heat, moisture and time, and still have little idea how it’s going to turn out; the latter interpret the result using generalisation, assumption, history and hindsight. We guess blindly then filter events through that lens. (2018, pp. 66–67)

At times, his tone can be caustic; the description of Steve Smith as ‘impressively dull’ (2018, p. 101) is one such example. However, the elegant detail that Lemon uses when illustrating Smith’s on the field achievements reveal a sense of authenticity— he will acknowledge amazing skill, poor decisions, and boring personalities equally. Haigh is similarly tough on what he presents as poor decision making but frames his judgement in (slightly) softer language. Take, for example, a segment in which he discusses the success of the Australian men’s team in 2013 as Darren Lehmann took over the coaching role with little warning and preparation. Presenting key details regarding the reasons for Australia’s surprising return to success, Haigh asks: ‘Was the 5–0 home Ashes scoreline a dividend of the high-performance investment of the years since the Argus Review, or a last extraction from the reserves laid down in the preceding generation? … Ah, who cared?’ (2018, p. 80). He remains pointed and targeted, but regularly makes heavy use of insinuation.

Thematic Interpretations Finally, it is also possible to identify a small number of shared thematic interpretations within both Haigh and Lemon’s works. This is not surprising—the available evidence appears to support the widely acknowledged interpretation of events (in which Warner, Smith and Bancroft all had levels of implication within a ball tampering incident that cannot be considered in isolation from the decades of toxic culture building underway within Cricket Australia). However, there is room for

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nuance between the two texts. For Haigh, this is a systemic failing of Cricket Australia that has set the current players—Warner, Smith, and Bancroft particularly—to fail. The organisation’s executive level is too concerned with profit, metrics, and impossible and opaque standards, such as an ‘x factor’. Lemon similarly places fault on the powerful people behind Cricket Australia; however, he also suggests the complicity of beloved past players, the national selectors, the coach, and the complex role of the players themselves. Both texts lay significant blame for Sandpapergate on the structural makeup of Cricket Australia. Haigh, especially, includes (non-attributed) quotations that question the intentions and motivations of the executive staff, the drive for profit, and the desperate measures undertaken to achieve success. Haigh sees an organisation focused on metrics over people and the long-term impact of a structural choice to prioritise youth and possibility over age and experience. In Steve Smith’s Men, Lemon too questions Cricket Australia and their role in establishing a culture of aggression and an intense need for game success. He also suggests a, perhaps, bigger failure was the unwillingness of the organisation (and indeed, of almost anyone) to truly identify what Lemon believes is Steve Smith’s lack of leadership capability earlier in his career. As a result: when things got dark in South Africa, the captain didn’t have a guiding store of principles to draw on. All CA had drilled into him was to win and back up your mates, the classic Australian way. There had been directives to be aggressive and directives to avoid losing, both carrying the implication to do whatever it took (2018, p. 211).

As has been since widely reported, perhaps most directly by Jarrod Kimber (2019), Cricket Australia has a history of avoiding responsibility and covering up problematic behaviour. We see this in the Paine resignation in 2021. Considering the shifting landscape of cricket in the wake of major broadcast deals underway in 2022, the high level of consideration of financial gain is unlikely to diminish in Australia or internationally—the impact of this on the corporate leadership of the organisation remains to be seen. In Crossing the Line, Haigh subtly suggests that Warner’s leadership capability is more tested and successful than that of Smith’s. Accordingly, the implication is that Warner is perhaps a bigger loss to the leadership capacity of the Australian team in comparison to Steve Smith. As Warner reaches the inevitable twilight of his playing career, he will presumably retire unable to captain any Australian international or domestic cricket team. Lemon and Haigh spend some time dismantling the language used by both Cricket Australia and the national men’s team, including the ‘spirit of cricket’ (a phrase included specifically and then removed in internal strategic planning in 2017, according to Haigh) and the concept of ‘crossing the line’. Lemon dedicates the first few pages of Chapter 21 (pp. 234–238) to various quotations about crossing, headbutting, walking up to but not over the line. He embraces the absurdity of the phrasing by progressively introducing quotations from frustrated cricket correspondents (‘oh, that bloody line’) before finally finishing with a reference to Johnny Cash (p. 238). Comedic value aside, the chapter then is damning of the abusive on-field

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behaviour ingrained in Australian cricket culture. Where Haigh primarily focuses on the negative culture that is condoned from the top and trickling down; Lemon reminds the reader that the toxic culture also exists and is embedded at a grassroots level. It is this slightly more nuanced examination of the broader culture that also allows for Lemon’s most powerful inclusion: a specific discussion of the misogynistic undertones of the entire South Africa tour and the hurtful treatment of women in cricket—especially in this instance, Candice Warner. Steve Smith’s Men expands on simmering intensity that contextualises what happened on the field on 24 March 2018. A longstanding mix of personalities, a history of the poor attitude towards women in sporting cultures in Australia, and on-field aggression spilling into offfield altercations. Lemon’s firm reminder that Candice Warner is the silenced victim in this story is all the more powerful because of how it does not absolve David Warner of his actions: So we’re back to the multiple truths of David Warner. He personally didn’t have a leg to stand on. He was also right about what was unacceptable. He was less right about approving his own contributions. (2018, p. 145)

Men’s cricket in Australia has never suffered from a lack of representation. Where Stell (2022, p. 2) questions whether ‘active participation [by women in Australia] is enough to embed them within the cultural narrative of Australian sport’, men’s cricket has long been considered at elevated heights of national interest. As the oft-reported joke goes, former Prime Minister John Howard suggested he held the second-most important office behind that of the men’s Test captain (Knox, 2021, para 7). Sandpapergate certainly drew attention at a national level. As mentioned earlier, this incident was extensively covered by sports and mainstream media in March 2018—so much so that ESPN Cricinfo (2018) has retained a specific page called ‘The ball-tampering incident: full coverage’, collating a chronology of their news articles and videos from March 24–April 5. Much of this media coverage was revealing and insightful. However, Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men as two longer forms of cricket writing allow for authors Haigh and Lemon to unpack some greater nuance from that moment in time on a South African cricket pitch. Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men are two examples of sports writing that use different techniques to—in many ways—come to similar conclusions. Both are embedded within non-fiction and journalistic practice and this is crucial to their ability to capture both the procedural and personal elements of Sandpapergate. Importantly, these texts work at their best when intersecting with creative writing techniques. Lemon’s focus on a handful of characters (notably the titular Steve Smith, David Warner, Cameron Bancroft, and a small number of others)—and the representation of his own role within the narrative—provides great insight into the inner workings of the Australian men’s cricket team not usually apparent to a more casual follower. Haigh’s ability to weave policy discussion into a compelling narrative—a technique surely honed not only from Haigh’s journalistic skills but prior creative non-fiction endeavours—again positions Sandpapergate as a product of a cultural framework established decades earlier. This is what immediate journalistic pieces,

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bound by timelines and word counts, cannot always capture. Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men are examples of cricket writing informed by creative writing practice that form the foundational representations of Sandpapergate’s milestone moment in Australian, and possibly world, cricket history.

Conclusion Sandpapergate was a moment of intense scrutiny on cricket in Australia. It brought about significant change in the playing team and associated staff and the country’s lead organisations. Internal reviews were inscrutable and limited in scope. While Haigh’s work covers enormous, historical ground and captures a chronology that illuminates much of what happened in the decades leading up to the fateful day in Cape Town, Lemon instead focuses in on a handful of characters. As such, the texts cover similar but unique ground. As a narrative, Steve Smith’s Men is arguably more captivating and reveals a complexity to these characters—David Warner particularly. Nearly five years on from the moment in question, both Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men are the significant long-form contributions to this topic. Until, as Lemon suggests, players retire and tell their own stories, these two texts represent a comprehensive coverage of the lead up and aftermath—while also capturing the intensity and ferocity of the public response at the time. Lemon’s work particularly evokes the tumultuous period of scrutiny that Australian cricket faced. Ultimately, both Crossing the Line and Steve Smith’s Men bring particular elements worth examining to better understand the role of texts like this in making sense of what was an incredibly consuming national story in March of 2018. As examples of cricket writing, Haigh’s work comfortably fits within the subcategory of non-fiction texts that capture a moment in time. The timeliness of the book is part of its appeal; Haigh is able to contextualise the event and the aftermath within a very short time period after the event. Crossing the Line is, at its core, a journalistic endeavour that reveals a number of disconcerting and challenging issues from behind the closed doors of Cricket Australia. Lemon’s Steve Smith’s Men is, of course, also an example of non-fiction cricket writing in a similar way. However, there are elements within the text that see it occasionally slip into a style similar to a cricket memoir. Lemon emerges on the pages in this book as a character himself with agency and opinions. While still retaining the rigour of a non-fiction journalistic account, Steve Smith’s Men is infused with creative writing techniques— characterisation, poetic imagery and metaphor—and for this reader, that made it all the more entertaining, engaging, and humanising. After all, Sandpapergate at its core remains a human story.

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References Akram, W., & Gideon, H. (2022). Sultan: A memoir. Hardie Grant Books. Brien, D. L. (2004). True tales that nurture: Defining auto/biographical storytelling. Australian folklore, 19, 84–95. https://acquire.cqu.edu.au/articles/journal_contribution/True_tales_that_ nurture_defining_auto_biographical_storytelling/13439273 Baum, G. (2018, November 1). Cricket scandal review: Gideon Haigh and Geoff Lemon on Australia’s disgrace. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/entertain ment/books/cricket-scandal-review-gideon-haigh-and-geoff-lemon-on-australias-disgrace-201 81101-h17doz.html Baum, G. (2021, December 16). Blown Back to the future: The loved-loathed Smith thrust back into the spotlight. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/blown-backto-the-future-the-loved-loathed-steve-smith-thrust-back-into-the-spotlight-20211216-p59i6v. html Brettig, D. (2015). Whitewash to Whitewash: Australian cricket’s years of struggle and summer of Riches. Viking. Brettig, D. (2021, May 17). Cricket needs a global ball-tampering inquiry to clear the air. ESPN Cricinfo. https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/cricket-needs-a-global-ball-tampering-inq uiry-to-clear-the-air-1263308 Chiu, A. (2018, March 29). ‘Sandpapergate’ cheating scandal rocks Australian cricket: ‘It beggars belief,’ says prime minister. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mor ning-mix/wp/2018/03/28/sandpapergate-cheating-scandal-rocks-australian-cricket-it-beggarsbelief-says-prime-minister/ Dixit, P. (2018). Decolonial strategies in world politics: C.L.R. James and the writing and playing of cricket. Globalizations, 15(3), 377–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1424284 Duncan, S., & Glenn, I. (2020). Who owns the narrative? In R. Steen, J. Novick, & H. Richards (Eds.), Routledge handbook of sports journalism (pp. 295–319). Taylor & Francis Group. ESPN Cricinfo staff. (2018, March 25). The ball-tampering incident: Full coverage. ESPN Cricinfo. https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/the-ball-tampering-incident-full-coverage-1141543 Finch, C. F., Elliot, B. C., & McGrath, A. C. (1999). Measures to prevent cricket injuries. Sports Medicine, 28(4), 263–272. https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-199928040-00004 Frith, D. (2020). Archie Jackson: Cricket’s tragic genius. Slattery Media Group. Gemmell, J. (2007). All white mate? Cricket and race in Oz. Sport in Society, 10(1), 33–48. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17430430600989118 Gunesekera, R. (2008). The match. Bloomsbury. Haigh, G. (1999). Mystery spinner: The story of Jack Iverson. Text Publishing. Haigh, G. (2001). The big ship: Warwick Armstrong and the making of modern cricket. Text Publishing. Haigh, G. (2012). On Warne. Penguin. Haigh, G. (2018). Crossing the line: How Australian cricket lost its way. The Slattery Media Group. Hill, J. (2012). Queering the pitch: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and the cricket novel. Sport in Society, 15(2), 181–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2012.637692 Hughson, J., & Hughson, M. (2021). Beyond the boundary: The Sandpapergate scandal and the limits of transnational masculinity. Sport in Society, 24(8), 1388–1402. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17430437.2021.1931132 Hussain, N. (2004). Playing with fire: The autobiography. Michael Joseph (Penguin Group). Hytner, M. (2021, November 19). Tim Paine resigns as Australia’s test cricket captain over “private” text messages sent to colleague. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ 2021/nov/19/tim-paine-resigns-australia-test-cricket-captain-text-messages-colleague Ingerson, L., & Naraine, M. L. (2019). It’s just not cricket: A case of ethics, integrity, and organizational culture within a national sport governing body. Case Studies Sport Management, 8(S1), S1–S6. https://doi.org/10.1123/cssm.2018-0014 John, E. (2016). Following on. Bloomsbury Publishing.

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Kimber, J. (2019, April 25). The ugly Australian: The evolution of a cricket species. The Cricket Monthly. https://www.thecricketmonthly.com/story/1181098/the-ugly-australian--theevolution-of-a-cricket-species Knox, M. (2004). Adult book. Bloomsbury. Knox, M. (2021, December 17). How the mythology behind Test captaincy led to Oscar-worth drama. The Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/sport/cricket/how-the-mythol ogy-behind-test-captaincy-led-to-oscar-worthy-drama-20211217-p59ifd.html Lemon, G. (2015, February 13). Just not cricket—How channel nine is destroying a legacy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/feb/13/channel-nine-destroyingcricket-legacy Lemon, G. (2018). Steve Smith’s men: Behind Australian cricket’s fall. Hardie Grant Books. Lemon, G. (2020). The comeback summer. Hardie Grant Books. Lord, D. (2011, August 19). Argus review gets right and wrong with criticisms. The Roar. https:// www.theroar.com.au/2011/08/20/argus-gets-it-right-and-wrong-in-pillage-of-aussie-cricket/ Mercer, P. (2018, March 26). Australia cricket scandal: A body blow to an incredulous nation. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-43537767 Nalapat, A., & Parker, A. (2005). Sport, celebrity and popular culture: Sachin Tendulkar, cricket and Indian nationalisms. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 40(4), 433–446. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1012690205065750 Nicholson, R. (2015). ‘Like a man trying to knit’?: Women’s cricket in Britain, 1945–2000. Doctoral dissertation, Queen Mary University of London. https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456 789/12987 Nicholson, R. (2019). Ladies and lords: A history of women’s cricket in Britain. Peter Lang. Noakes, T. D., & Durandt, J. J. (2000). Physiological requirements of cricket. Journal of Sports Sciences, 18(12), 919–929. https://doi.org/10.1080/026404100446739 Perry, E. (2019). Perspective. HarperCollins. Reed, R. (2022). Captain pat: Cometh the hour. Wilkinson Publishing. Smith, M. J., Young, D. J., Figgins, S. G., & Arthur, C. A. (2017). Transformational leadership in elite sport: A qualitative analysis of effective leadership behaviors in cricket. The Sport Psychologist, 31(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1123/tsp.2015-0077 Steen, R. (2020). Why sports journalism matters. In R. Steen, J. Novick, & H. Richards (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Sports Journalism (pp. 1–20). Taylor & Francis Group. Stell, M. (2022). Girl number twenty: Towards an anthology of creative writing on sport by Australian women. TEXT, 26(Special 67), 1–14. https://textjournal.scholasticahq.com/article/ 37827-girl-number-twenty-towards-an-anthology-of-creative-writing-on-sport-by-australianwomen Szymanski, S., & Wigmore, T. (2022). Crickonomics: The anatomy of modern cricket. Bloomsbury. Tossell, D. (2018). Tony Greig: A reappraisal of English cricket’s most controversial captain. Pitch Publishing. Tikka, S. K., & Garg, S. (2018). Sandpaper-Gate: Psychology plays its innings. Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine, 40(3), 296–298. https://doi.org/10.4103/IJPSYM.IJPSYM_151_18 Warne, S., & Nicholas, M. (2020). No Spin. Penguin. White, F. (2022). It’s always summer somewhere: A matter of life and cricket. Cassell. Wigmore, T., & Wilde, F. (2019). Cricket 2.0: Inside the T20 Revolution. Polaris Publishing. Williams, M. (2019, August 3). Why Adam Collins and Geoff Lemon risked a house deposit to broadcast a cricket Test series. ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-03/geofflemon-adam-collins-changing-cricket-coverage-in-australia/11345286 Zwar, A. (2021). Twelve summers. Hachette Australia.

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Dr Elizabeth Ellison is the Deputy Dean (Research) for the School of Education and the Arts at Central Queensland University. Liz’s research has traversed regional arts and creative industries, and Australian popular culture and media studies since she completed her doctorate examining Australian beach texts. She leads a number of externally funded regional arts projects and is passionate about supervising postgraduate research students.

Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Place in Sports Fiction

The Architecture of the Sporting Site in Irish Fiction Gráinne Daly

Abstract The spatial turn in literary studies has resulted in a greater focus on the roles of space, place, and geography on the page. It follows that the relationship between sporting culture and literature is one in which the representation of space and place are key players. This chapter interrogates the literary architecture of sports sites in the creative literature of Irish writers. It considers sporting spaces as those places in which people gather in pursuit of play or for the consumption of sport. It examines the ways in which sporting spaces are implicated in the politics of memory, and how they serve as literary embodiments of memorial consciousness. Looking at a selection of representations of sports sites, this chapter seeks to examine the elision of literature and sporting space. This work deconstructs the Irish literary sportscape in an attempt to understand the significance of its architecture for creative writers. It asks what the implications are for creative writers who pitch the coordinates of sports sites to the page. Keywords Literary sportscape · Sport fiction · Sports sites · Cultural remembrance · Topophilia · Irish writers

Introduction This chapter will concentrate on the relationship between literary architecture and the sporting site in Irish fiction, and explore the spatial agency of Irish writers and how they actively contribute to the production of space. Intrinsic to a consideration of literature is its relationship with space, place, and culture. It follows that the relationship between physical culture and literature is one in which the representation of space and place are key players. Ellen Eve Frank considered that literature and architecture are inherently connected, ‘one whose characteristic form seizes actual space as territory, the other whose characteristic form spells time’ (1979, p. 7). In G. Daly (B) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_5

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my work, along with literature and architecture, sport completes the triumvirate bound by temporal and structural forms. There is an inherent aesthetic, emotional, and physical aspect to each. Architecture recruits constructed landscapes to convey narratives, often relying on elements of the cultural or physical environment to do so. Literature represents social spaces and is also formed by those social spaces. It gives us material environments through the prism of a textual space. Taken as cultural artefacts, literature and sport serve as social records that inform us about society, its values, and customs. Both are intrinsically linked with memory, history, and the nation. Memory is made from the fabric of tradition and repetition. It is woven from the dialogue between our past and our present selves and it is rooted in spaces, actions, songs, and structures. It is captured in the pages of books, and on playing fields, in word and in play, in the lyric of Heaney and the chants of fans on Hill 16; it is in the architecture of Joyce’s work and in that of Croke Park. The interplay between fact and fiction generates valuable insights into the characteristics of Irish culture.

Literary Architecture and the Irish Sportscape In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino writes, ‘the city is a novel’ (1997, p. 10), and just as Venice is created out of the chaos of Calvino’s imaginings, so too is Ireland built from the vowels of its literature. Like all great capital cities, Dublin is the birthplace of many great works of literature. Ireland’s rich bardic tradition and oral storytelling culture has carried forward into generations of fine storytellers given to the written word. Ireland has known many invasions from Vikings and Normans, and more recently the British, and is not without a varied and colourful history influenced by the people who have called it home. On Venice, Calvino states, ‘populations and customs have changed several times; [but] the name, the site, and the objects hardest to break remain’ (1997, p. 97). And though customs change and evolve, culture is a hard object to break. It is reified through repetition and kept alive in the memory of a collective. Architect Sigfried Giedion wrote, ‘architecture is a part of life and architecture is a part of art’ (1967, p. 544). In the recreation of sporting Ireland on the page, art and architecture bring the place to life. They reimagine the structure and essence of a place on the page, often creating accurate impressions of its social, cultural, and physical architecture. It is this dialectic between place and creative writing that Seamus Heaney (1989) spoke of when he highlighted the importance of the relationship between a writer and his or her place: The usual assumption when we speak of writers and place is that the writer stands in some directly expressive or interpretive relationship to the milieu. He or she becomes a voice of the spirit of the region. The writing is infused with the atmosphere, physical and emotional of a certain landscape or seascape. (p. 20)

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Yi-Fu Tuan’s (1990) work on topophilia focuses on the sporting space, sports grounds in this case, from a geographical perspective. Tuan defines this topophilia as, ‘all of the human being’s affective ties with the material environment’ (1990, p. 93). Central to its examination in literature is Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘production of space’ whereby people collectively produce their social spaces in concrete and imaginary ways (Murphet, 2004, p. 131). Indeed, this spatial production or spatial creativity holds true in literature and sport and allows for analysis of their overlap; the intersection of pitch and page, where side-lines blur into lines of text, memory is rememorised, and a unique space is created. This ‘space’ is a corollary to the geography of the sporting site and to that of the written narrative whose landscapes act as an archive culture in text. It is a liminal space of sorts in which creativity thrives. These links, which can be seen across Irish sports fiction, demonstrate this skirting between fact and fiction, between the faith and fantasy on which fandom is built, and the unreliability of an outcome or of a character’s role in that outcome. Sporting culture is an arena in which modern Irish identity has been contested, created, and recreated. In Sites of Sport: Space, Place, Experience, editors John Bale and Patricia Vertinsky stress the importance of ‘the sight as much as the site’ in understanding the significance of place in sport (2004, p. 1). There is an innately ekphrastic element to the relationship between creative writing and sport. Literary translations of the visual sportscape can be taken as ekphrastic forms: they represent architectural sports sites and visual aspects of sport reimagined through textual play. Michael Oriard believes that ‘Football has its own inherent narrative structure: its alternating offensive attacks. The defense, its differentiated positions, its ultimate resolution in victory or defeat’ (1993, p. 20). For the writer, there is the challenge of accurately conveying movement and the essence of the play, for the reader, there is the invitation to ‘observe’ the events of the pitch unfolding on the page. In each case, the process of engaging with this textual form of sport is a ludic experience. Sports sites are receptacles for tradition and creed and the very act of entering such a site is a custom in itself that symbolises faith on the part of the fan or visitor. It is a site of memory and of memories to come. In their very nature, memories are intrinsic elements of the creative process that rely on imagery and narration. Adrian Duncan’s short story collection, Midfield Dynamo (2021), in its eye-catching 1-4-42 layout, is aesthetically in dialogue with our understanding of soccer formations. Duncan further structures the collection in four sections: Defence, Midfield, Up Front and Coach inviting creativity on the part of the reader in imagining the work as a game or a linked piece of play. In her introduction to Eavan Boland’s collection, A Poet’s Dublin (2014), Jody Allen Randolph alludes to the flux and shift of meaning in creative works: ‘an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined’ (Randolph, as cited in Boland, 2014, p. 1). Boland’s collection seeks to ‘sketch out a paradigm for how a city is imagined’ (Randolph, as cited in Boland, 2014, p. 11). Speaking about the relationship of the river Liffey to Dublin, Boland says that:

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The sports site can be viewed in similar terms in so far as it absorbs the sounds, scores, and sweat of games only to reflect them back by way of memory. Ireland’s concrete stadia, its old wooden pavilions, hardwood basketball courts, and boathouses that dip into the Liffey waters are all bound within the fabrics of imagination and memory. What follows is a journey through that artistic testimony that proposes a literary cartography of Irish sports sites. This chapter takes into consideration landscapes that are fictional, metafictional, and those that constitute authored landscapes with variegated versions of the sportscape.

Memorial Architecture and the Literary Sportscape Drawing on work carried out by Maurice Halbwachs (1992), one can appraise cultural remembrance as a key tenet in the literary treatment of sports sites and by extension, to consider the symbiosis of sport and literature as repositories of collective memory. Sports sites are, both architecturally and symbolically, imbued with a sense of meaning and connection in what is characterised as topophilia. Nostalgia accrues and places often take on deep and sometimes spiritual meanings for sports fans. Bale argues that ‘sports landscapes are often accumulations. … Just as each stadium has a builder … each landscape can be interpreted as having an “author”’ (1994, p. 13). Sport can be interpreted as a place of authored landscapes in which players, fans, architects, and all those involved have a role in constructing the sportscape. This idea of collaboration in creating the space of sport links with Lefebvre’s (1991) concept of the ‘production of space’. Much like Bale’s concept of ‘authorship’ of the sportscape, Lefebvre outlines how humans collectively construct their social spaces in imagined and concrete ways. It is through this creation of space that group identity is sustained over time, as is the case with the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), whereby a proliferation of culturally defensive narratives has led to the perpetuation of its nationalist ethos. Coded with rules that were effusively anti-British, the largest sporting organisation in the country was conceived in a spirit of hegemonic nationalism. Its headquarters, Croke Park, is located in Dublin city and is Ireland’s most iconic sporting site. Taking Halbwachs’ (1992) theory that memory depends on social environment, we can assert that sporting memories depend on the environment in which they are made. Aspects of the rural–urban dialogue are evident across the playing fields of Irish literature. The use of the GAA, in particular, is versatile for writers on account of its nature as an all-island organisation with roots in urban and rural areas. This enables authors to recreate the social and sporting landscape with great effect. A number of John McGahern’s short stories feature Gaelic games and can be read as

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social documents that convey a sense of the powerful role of the GAA in rural towns. In The Creamery Manager (1991), McGahern reimagines the day of an Ulster Final in Clones. We are told that the protagonist is relieved that there is not ‘a single person he knew sitting in any of the nearby seats’ (McGahern, 1991, p. 26), which reveals he perhaps expected to see people he knew. The crowd, on the day of GAA finals, is bound up with the local: the same people who have always supported their county and who sit in more or less the same areas of the ground year in, year out. It is a thing of tradition and kith and kin. McGahern is a master at evoking a sense of county identity in his treatment of players and fans. In ‘Love of the World’ (2009), the antagonist, Guard Harkin, who played football for County Mayo, caused great joy when on being transferred to another Garda Station he declared that he would play for the local team. This creates a sense of the lure of an intercounty player, especially in a football-mad county like Mayo (McGahern, 2009, p. 336). Civic carnival took grip of Ireland during the Italia 1990 FIFA Men’s World Cup, when the Republic of Ireland football team first qualified for the tournament. Streets were lined with tricolours and bunting under the grip of ‘Jack’s Army’ fever in a great outpouring of sporting patriotism. Roddy Doyle’s The Van (1994b) recreates the fever that gripped the city in the midst of Italia’90. For the first time in the country’s history, football (soccer) became the central focus of life while the Republic of Ireland’s team played their way to the quarter-finals. It was a new language on most people’s tongue as masses of the population became invested in the plight of the national team. Doyle (1994b) captures the idea of this novel language of football with its invasion of family life: The country had gone soccer mad. … Half the mammies in Barrytown were watching the afternoon matches, and after the extra-time and the penalty shoot-outs there was no time left to make the dinner before the next match. The whole place was living on chips. (1994b, p. 508).

We also see this portrayal of ritualistic sporting tradition in Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll Kelly (2013) series. Ross alludes to the pinnacle game of the schools’ rugby season, Senior Cup, that unleashes age-old inter-school rivalry in either Donnybrook or the Aviva: ‘Donnybrook is, like, jammers. … There’s, like, four or five hundred from our school, then there’s birds from, like, everywhere’ (Howard, 2013, p. 115). In much the same way as architecture has its own ‘dialects’ (Frank, 1979, p. 255), the sporting landscape bears distinctive regional nuances. For a variety of reasons, some sports are more popular in some areas compared with others, and in a small country such as Ireland, these regional accents are quite pronounced across the sporting complexion of the country. The GAA was initially founded with an ethos of promoting the nationalist identity of the Gaelic community on the island. It was set up along the parish boundary system that was organised by the Catholic Church. Eudora Welty wrote that ‘fiction is all bound up in the local. The internal reason for that is surely that feelings are bound up in place’ (2002, p. 41). Among the distinguishing features of the local in Irish fiction is the texture of dialogue and speech denoting regionality.

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Tadhg Coakley’s The First Sunday in September (2018) charts the day of an AllIreland Hurling final and creates a vibrant tapestry of accounts of the biggest game of the year on the hurling calendar. Many of the stories that make up this exciting novel build a picture of the hugely ritualistic nature of attending matches for GAA fans. There is a very real reliance on tradition and the observance of codes. In ‘The Glory of that Day’ an emigrant from Clare recreates Croke Park from the granular detail of her memory, ‘climbing up the interminable concrete steps of the Upper Cusack and emerging out into a delirium of possibility. … The sound, that sound when Clare came on to the pitch, the frenzied roar of tens of thousands’ (Coakley, 2018, pp. 151–152). Here Coakley touches on aspects of the match-day that are treasured in the Gaelic memory: the sounds and sights and smells, the county colours, the pilgrimage to Croke Park. Much like how John McGahern brings the sense of the local to his GAA stories, Coakley also gives us this impression of the familiarity within the GAA community as characters recognise spectators and former players in the ground at the game.

Sociology of the Literary Sportscape The creative writer heralds sport as a most useful metaphor for class. Joyce, in his representation of a rugby game early on in Portrait of An Artist (1916/1991), goes into detail about the salubrious settings of Clongowes Wood school in Co. Kildare. Paul Howard, in his Ross O’Carroll Kelly series, now in its twenty-fourth book, also writes about private schools steeped in history and wealth. In writing towards the tradition of rugby played in Ireland’s elite fee-paying schools, Howard establishes a vivid sense of the vibrant school-boy rugby landscape and a city that is drenched in class stratification (2012, 2013). Similarly, an impression of poverty in sporting culture is created in Fiachra Sheridan’s novel, The Runners (2009). Sheridan conjures the landscape of inner-city training facilities, some of which are neglected or lacking investment; an accurate portrayal of the inequity that exists in some socio-economically deprived areas of Dublin. In The Runners, a pool and an indoor gym represents a significant step up from its humbler, and seemingly less sanitary, counterpart in MacDermott St. The progression from one to the other symbolises a social achievement of sorts for the two young boys who could enjoy the somewhat cleaner surroundings of the School for the Blind pool: The School for the Blind had a swimming pool as well as an indoor gym. The dressing-rooms were four times as big as the ones in Sean MacDermott Street swimming pool. And they were clean. Sean Mac was verruca city. A killer verruca meant no football. (2009, pp. 25–26)

Indeed, for children of economically deprived areas such as those in Sheridan’s (2009) novel, the street takes on licence as the sportscape or place of play. Street games have always gone hand in hand with urban living in working class areas.

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In The Van, Roddy Doyle’s protagonist, Jimmy Snr, pushes a van up the street and compares the scenes on his road to the Tour de France (Doyle, 1994b, p. 456). Novelists Paula McGrath and Fiachra Sheridan both portray the streetscape as a stage for expression and sporting performance. McGrath’s protagonist in A History of Running Away (2017) runs along the coast road from Fairview to Clontarf training to become a boxer, and Dublin takes on a democratising dimension that empowers her to engage with the male-dominated territory of boxing. The boys in Sheridan’s novel race each other around Croke Park, and again the streets become a democratising space: a levelling field in a city in which they are acutely aware of inequity and the economic hardship in which they live. Like Paddy Clarke and his pals in Roddy Doyle’s novel, the two boys in The Runners are given to fantastical dreaming of sports glory as a means of playing and simultaneously transcending their places of play: When they normally raced a lap of Croker, they would take it easy all the way around and then have a sprint finish down Clonliffe Road. If you went too fast at the start, you burned out before the end. … He was formulating a race plan in his head. It was the final of the Olympic Games. He would be a national hero if he won. … He set off down the Ballybough Road at a blistering pace. … He decided to give it one last push down the hill past Croke Park. (Sheridan, 2009, pp. 106-107)

Just as sports sites attract textured meaning, the sports streetscape is no different. There are numerous examples of this personification of the streetscape across literature; a tendency we see in which setting and place very often assume the role of character. In Roddy Doyle’s The Snapper (1994a), home becomes the ‘velodrome’ as Jimmy Snr sets up a cycling club that trains on the street around the housing estate. The kids have decrepit bikes and wear hurling helmets (as opposed to cycling helmets) in a scene where the street becomes the battleground played out in sporting terms. Joyce’s (1991) short story ‘After the Race’ gives a sense of the sense of deprivation in the Irish capital at that time. Joyce juxtaposes the image of poor citizens spectating the scene of an expensive motor car race: The cars came scudding in towards Dublin, running evenly like pellets in the groove of the Naas Road. At the crest of the hill at Inchicore sightseers had gathered in clumps to watch cars careering homeward, and through this channel of poverty and inaction the Continent sped its wealth and industry. Now and again the clumps of people raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed. (Joyce, 1991, p. 21)

In describing people, Joyce’s repetition of the term ‘clumps’ is indicative of the way in which poverty dehumanises individuals. It reduces them to people reliant on the charity of others, it removes their independence. They become mere ‘clumps’ on the landscape of Dublin. When set against the spectacle of grandeur that the Inchicore Street has become with the ‘wealth’ speeding past, Joyce gives us an impression of affluence being an unattainable thing for these poor spectators. The motor race is a symbol of continental power and largesse. Interestingly, although the spectators are poor, Joyce describes them as ‘gratefully oppressed’ (Joyce, 1991, p. 21). It seems as though they are grateful for the distraction of the race. And perhaps, that is a theme

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that can be drawn from the story: that sport can bring cheer to the streets and to those who need it. The streetscape is an imagined stadium for the aspiring athletes and is reimagined in literature to convey a sense of agency on the part of those who call it their own. It is a liminal field in which aspiring athletes toil and dream of ascending to the arena of success. It democratises to the extent that it is accessible by all, yet it is only those from low-income areas who rely on the streets as their playground. Very much a feature of working-class life, streets continue to witness the practice of sport and the establishment of sporting rituals among its youth. Stephen Dedalus’s closing remarks in Portrait of an Artist (1916/1991) allude to the act of articulating collective consciousness: ‘I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’ (Joyce, 1991, p. 260). Of course, for the first three decades of the GAA’s history, it existed in a country under British rule. It was through codified sport, a concept that had been greatly advanced by the regulation of British sports at the end of the nineteenth century, that Irish cultural identity was being constructed. Perhaps when we consider the production and consumption of Irish literature and sport against this idea, it may be better understood as conforming to Foucault’s idea of ‘heterotopia’ wherein it is possible to ‘juxtapose in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (as cited in Soja, 1989, p. 17). Seán O’Casey presents an unflinching image of nationalism in Pictures in the Hallway when he describes Charles Stewart Parnell’s funeral being ‘packed by young men wearing white-cuffed green jerseys’ (1942, p. 66) and waving ‘their hurleys on high’ (1942, p. 67). The chapter ‘Cat and Cage’ recounts a scene in which the hurlers are discussing Parnell and his politics. There are arguments and there is much antiBritish sentiment, as one might expect, but interestingly there is antipathy toward the hurlers also. They are referred to as, ‘Boyos, with the hurleys’ and ‘Gawks. Bogtrotters who have never seen anything higher than a haystack’ (O’Casey, 1942, p. 70). The Cat and Cage pub (still a favourite watering hole for GAA fans on Croke Park match-days) becomes a ground for contesting varying ideas of nationalism. Archie and Tom see the hurlers as parochial, calling them ‘hayfoot, strawfoot, fusiliers’ (O’Casey, 1942, p. 70). They doubt the true pedigree of their nationalistic virtue in relation to their support, or lack thereof, for Parnell: I’ll go bail, said Mick, there were few hurlers’ hands helpin’ to pack him into his coffin. … The whole bang lot o’them, said Tom, taking no notice of the hurler (Parnell), deserted their Leader in his time o’ need. (O’Casey, 1942, p. 74)

Sport is a source of binary narratives and is ripe with examples of the tension that existed between sports that were perceived as being more native than their British counterparts. As mentioned earlier, this sporting patriotism was no more apparent than in Roddy Doyle’s The Van during Ireland’s first World Cup in 1990, when Dublin’s streets were lined with tricolours and bunting under the grip of ‘Jack’s Army’ fever, ‘There were flags hanging out of nearly every window in Barrytown’ (Doyle, 1994b, p. 508). Doyle also creates a vivid scene in The Van in which the

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local pub, The Hikers, is packed with fans watching the 1990 World Cup match in which Ireland scores an equaliser against England. It gives colourful insight into the lovelessness in which the relationship with the closest neighbour is held in a sporting sense: –Sheedy gets it back and Sheedy shoots! The place went fuckin’ mad! Ireland had got the equaliser. … All sorts of glasses toppled off the tables but no one gave a fuck. Ireland had scored against England and there was nothing more important than that, not even your pint. (Doyle, 1994b, p. 486)

Donal Ryan’s short story, Long Puck (2015), features a priest teaching young boys how to play hurling on the war-torn streets of Syria in a story that leads us to believe that sport is a lingua franca among the group of clergy and Muslim boys who delight in learning the game. However, the final scene is a harrowing one in which a group of Muslims, including some of the boys who hurled, slay all but one of the priests. The one surviving priest is left with a hurl in his hand, awaiting a further imminent attack in the church: I’m settled now in the nave, in the seat left empty by my curate who lies still where he fell, and I see through the porch and the open door that they’re back, and all I have as weapon against them is this hurley, with the words Halim Assam, All-Syria Long Puck Champion 2012 inscribed along the perfect shaft of it in beautiful calligraphy. (Ryan, 2015, p. 123)

Ryan takes religion and sport, two traditional bedfellows in many regards, and reminds us that neither creed nor physical culture is immune to pain and loss. The story goes some way to reminding us that social and cultural conflicts are resolved through the agency of sports. However, the green shoots that were sown early in the story, when the boys grew fond of hurling, were bloodied in the end. The final scene, which takes place in a site of worship, emphasises the parallels between stadium and church, between fan worship and ritual, between the things that make us similar and those that make us different. Taking Lefebvre’s notion of the ‘production of space’ as a prism through which to the examine the sportscape in Irish literature, it must be acknowledged that there is a tradition of seeing things through a ‘them and us’ binary coloured by turbulent relationships with the church and the British. This legacy mindset, that has been alluded to previously in the chapter, perpetuates to some degree as sportspeople and writers produce their social and sporting spaces.

Gendered Landscapes According to architect Yvonne Farrell, ‘architecture is a silent language that speaks; you read it when you walk through any city, you physically respond to the unconscious rhythm or beauty’ (as cited in Brady & O’Connell, 2020, p. 230). Owing to the gendered dimensions of sport and traditional male domination of the sporting space, a

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legacy aspect of contemporary sporting spaces is that they bear inherently male design aspects. It is unsurprising that there is a masculine rhythm to the Irish sportscape. Indeed, the sporting calendar is dominated by key events that were male-only in terms of participation, such as the All-Ireland hurling and Gaelic football finals and the Rugby Six-Nations. Across all sports, female participation and investment in structures and the development of women’s games is increasing, but progress takes time. Women’s boxing was given Olympic status thanks in no small part to the endeavours and campaigning of Irish boxer Katie Taylor, who won gold in London in 2012 at the first Olympics for the sport. More recently, Dublin’s Kellie Harrington took gold at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, affirming the strength of women’s boxing on the island. In August 2021, the Republic of Ireland’s women’s soccer team achieved pay parity with their male counterparts. Systems are improving. What does this mean for the literary sporting cartography? With some recent exceptions, the creative literature reflects the masculine environment that surrounds the Dublin sportscape. Inevitably, the motor race in Joyce’s story and the football tournament in Roddy Doyle’s The Van (1994b) are sporting events played by male participants. The ‘clumps’ of people gathered to observe the grand spectacle of the race and the crowd of elated revellers in The Hikers pub watching Ireland play England include men and women. Female fandom is not neglected across the literature, an accurate reflection of the sportscape in which female representation at events is significant, but the players on the pages are male. Paul Howard’s elite fee-paying rugby school is like all the others across the county: boys only. Women characters in his Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (2012–2021) books support the rugby players at matches, are college friends, wives, and girlfriends. A true reflection, perhaps, of the rugby landscape where, for the most part, men are the protagonists and women play the supporting roles. Paula McGrath’s novel, A History of Running Away (2017), challenges the status quo with its portrayal of the lone female boxer who has to dress up as a man to gain access to train in the boxing club. Patricia Vertinsky regards places of sport as being sustained by power relations and defined by boundaries, both social and spatial (as cited in Vertinsky & McKay, 2004, p. 50). McGrath’s male-only boxing club was founded on the rules that men boxed, women did not. The same can be said for many of the city’s important sites, be they administrative, legislative, or of a sporting nature. Rules of exclusion are a hangover from history and can be seen in all aspects of a city’s landscape. Much as with social networks, sports clubs foster cultures of belonging and exclusion. Vertinsky considers that, ‘in the gymnasium, bodies and places are woven together through intimate webs of social and spatial rules that were made by and embodied sporting subjects’ (as cited in Vertinsky & McKay, 2004, p. 50). McGrath’s female boxer trains along the Coast Road, her lone running a symbol of her agency and strength. She is training outside the gym and along the coastline of Dublin so that she can be fit enough to participate in the city centre boxing club. She is outside, trying to get in, a metaphor that echoes the story of Katie Taylor’s endeavours to compete alongside male peers at the highest level in the sport. For the protagonist in Eimear Ryan’s novel, Holding Her Breath (2021), the swimming pool is so much more than just a place of competition. Its waters

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are amniotic almost insofar as Beth tells us she grew up in the pool and explains how natural it feels to find oneself in a foetal position there (Ryan, 2021, pp.10–13). The swimming pool gives her agency and there is a poignant sense throughout of it being her natural habitat. We are told that ‘every moment of drama or triumph in her life has taken place in the pool’ (Ryan, 2021, p. 75). Ryan’s use of this richly charged language imbues the pool with a sense of the deeply spiritual. It is the place of creativity for Beth, both in sporting terms and psychologically. In Beth’s words, ‘it’s not an easy thing to explain – the way the pool lends itself to fantasies’ (Ryan, 2021, p. 33).

Synaesthesia and Topography Edward Said (2000) considered that ‘collective memory is not an inert and passive thing, but a field of activity in which past events are selected, reconstructed, maintained, modified and endowed with political meaning’ (p. 185). Much of the maintenance of memory comes in the form of aspects of synaesthesia and creative writers use this to great effect in evoking collective memory on the page. Steeped in nostalgia, Kevin Curran’s short story, In Football Season (2018) opens with two sentences that play on the senses and evoke an image of what it would be like to play on a costal Balbriggan football pitch: See a freshly cut pitch, the perpendicular clumps of yellowing spew-off lining the cropped surface in smooth hay fever handfuls waiting to be bunched and balled and forced down back and stuffed up jumpers … over the tracks from the cliffs and the stony beach below; home of a thousand lost footballs from over-zealous clearances. (Curran, 2018, p. 52)

It is difficult to detach our memories of sports sites from their sonic counterpoints: the roar of the fans on Hill 16, the silence of a packed Aviva Stadium as a kicker steps over the ball. In respecting this connection Curran gives a sonic reference of the train going by the pitch, ‘the horn of the Enterprise sounds from the viaduct. Empty faces peer fleetingly through windows as they dash across the scene, the metallic tut–a–tut– a–tut briefly deafening while it races to Belfast’ (Curran, 2018, p. 54), thus creating a geographic sense of the sporting moment in which that familiar train passes by a match in progress. Further, it seems that rituals attached to sports sites serve as materials with which to recreate the sportscape in literature. The fragrance of Deep Heat is synonymous with dressing rooms or boxing gyms in Curran’s story and Paula McGrath’s novel A History of Running Away (2017). McGrath’s protagonist enters the gym to discover ‘a waft of Deep Heat and sweaty socks’ (2017, p. 1263), while Curran’s protagonist reflects on the smell of Deep Heat permeating the changing room (Curran, 2018, p. 52). For the boys in Fiachra Sheridan’s The Runners (2009), there is no such luxury as anti-inflammatory ointment: their boxing club has just the ‘distinct smell of sweat and leather’ (p. 4). However, their youthful world is created with the customary drinks after sports. They sit ‘on top of Ballybough Bridge facing Croke Park, with

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their trophies and [Coke] cans beside them’ (Sheridan, 2009, p. 62) after winning a boxing tournament. The match in Kevin Curran’s story ends with ‘empty Coke bottles forgotten on the side line, the stray Tayto packets that come to rest on the grass and then stir with the rising wind’ (Curran, 2018, p. 56). Local cuisine favourites are used by Roddy Doyle also, to create the festival sense of World Cup Italia 1990. Central to Doyle’s use of food as symbolic of place is his use of Dublin wit, and his description of batter sausages that look like former Irish international and football pundit Eamon Dunphy (Doyle, 1994b, p. 506). Creative writers are architects of what Lefebvre considers l’espace vévu which is ‘actually lived and socially created spatiality, concrete and abstract at the same time’ (Soja, 1989, p. 18). Irish writers draw on reserves of collective memory to recreate the sportscape on the page, and in doing so, construct a cartography that is both lived and imagined, it is born of fact and fiction.

Conclusion In refracting a version of Ireland through the prism of collective sporting memory, Irish writers have reimagined a sportscape that is both concrete and abstract. This is congruent with Christina Simko’s definition of memory as it refers to agency as a cultural text: ‘It is the tissue that binds collectivities – from families to religious nations – together. It is not merely a way of preserving bygone history, but a source of both power and meaning in the present’ (2016, p. 458). The creative writers I have looked at have used the coordinates of Ireland’s sporting landscape: its ribbons of concrete, sweaty gym rooms, Deep Heat and endless geometrics of goalposts and crossbars to enrich their literature with a sense of what it means to be of the place in the present. Across the literary map, we see remnants of a relationship with Britain and an ongoing dialogue with evolving views on that relationship. We see how sports sites can be interpreted as literary embodiments of memorial consciousness and how they map for the reader an Irish sportscape that transcends geography and navigates the essence of the place. Creative writers who pitch the coordinates of sports sites to a page leverage the great potential of the literary imagination to fictionalise our experiences and transform space and place into meaning and story. The synergies between sporting sites and the imagination convey ideas and generate insight into the human condition. This chapter has consulted with theory and archive to appraise the imaginative constructs of sporting sites in Irish fiction. Just as literature needs story and sport tells a story, both require space; created or actual. Across Irish sporting literature, there is a sense of flexibility to this sporting space. The playing fields host action that lives on in the mind of fans long after the final whistle has sounded, much like stories live on in the mind of readers long after the book had been closed. Acknowledgements This chapter builds on research submitted for publication in TEXT Special Issue 66: Creative Writing and Sport, June 2022. The author is grateful to the editorial committee for their support.

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References Bale, J. (1994). Landscapes of sport. Leicester University Press. Bale, J., & Vertinsky, P. (Eds.). (2004). Sites of sport: Space, place and experience. Routledge. Boland, E. (2014). A poet’s Dublin. Carcanet. Brady, N., & O’Connell, S. (Eds.). (2020). Dublin by design: Architecture and the city. O’Brien Press. Calvino, I. (1997). Invisible cities. Vintage. Coakley, T. (2018). The first Sunday in September (eBook ed.). Mercier Press Curran, K. (2018). In football season.The Tangerine: A Magazine of New Writing, 5, 52–56. Doyle, R. (1994a). The snapper in The Barrytown Trilogy. Minerva. Doyle, R. (1994b). The van in The Barrytown Trilogy. Minerva. Duncan, A. (2021). Midfield dynamo. Lilliput Press. Frank, E. E. (1979). Literary architecture: Essays toward a tradition. University of California Press. Giedion, S. (1967). Space, time and architecture: The growth of a new tradition. Harvard University Press. Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. Chicago University Press. Heaney, S. (1989). The place of writing. Atlanta Scholars Press. Howard, P. (2012a). Triggs: The autobiography of Roy Keane’s dog (eBook ed.). Hachette Books Ireland. Howard, P. (2012b). Ross O’Carroll-Kelly: The miseducation years 1 (eBook ed.). The O’Brien Press. Howard, P. (2013). Ross O’Carroll-Kelly: The teenage dirtbag years 2 (eBook ed.). The O’Brien Press. Howard, P. (2021). Ross O’Carroll-Kelly: Normal sheeple (eBook ed.). Sandycove. Joyce, J. (1991). Collected volume: Dubliners. Chancellor Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Blackwell. McGahern, J. (1991). The creamery manager. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 17(1), 25–30. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25512850 McGahern, J. (2009). Love of the world. Creatures of the Earth: New and selected short stories (eBook ed.). Faber and Faber. McGrath, P. (2017). A history of running away (eBook ed.). John Murray Press. Murphet, J. (2004). Chapter 6—Postmodernism and space. In S. Connor (Ed.), Cambridge companion to postmodernism (pp. 116–135). Cambridge University Press. O’Casey, S. (1942). Pictures in the hallway. Macmillan. Oriard, M. (1993). Reading Football: How the popular press created an American spectacle. The University of North Carolina Press. Ryan, D. (2015). Long puck. In A slanting of the sun: Stories (eBook ed., pp. 124–132). Transworld Ireland. Ryan, E. (2021). Holding her breath (eBook ed.). Sandycove. Said, E. (2000). Invention, memory and place. Critical Enquiry, 26(2), 175–192. http://www.jstor. org/stable/1344120 Sheridan, F. (2009). The runners. New Island Books. Simko, C. (2016). Forgetting to remember: The present neglect and future prospects of collective memory. In S. Abruytn (Ed.), Forgetting to remember: The present neglect and future prospects of collective memory in sociological theory (pp. 456–457). Springer International Publishing. Soja, E. (1989). Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory. Verso. Tuan, Y. F. (1990). Topophilia: A study of environmental perceptions, attitudes, and values. Colombia University Press. Vertinsky, P., & McKay, S. (Eds.). (2004). Disciplining bodies in the gymnasium: Memory, monument, modernism. Routledge. Welty, E. (2002). On writing. Modern Library Editions.

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Gráinne Daly is an Irish Research Council funded scholar in University College Dublin where she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing. Sport in creative Irish literature is her primary research interest and her doctoral research explores the literary architecture of sport in Irish fiction.

Fury and Failure in Spanish Football Stories of the 1960s Adam L. Winkel

Abstract Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Spanish sports media and government representatives often employed a ‘fury and failure narrative’ to attribute Spain’s successes on the football pitch to certain national traits and blame its failures on outside forces and bad luck (Quiroga, 2013). This article explores the role of sport fiction as an element of this portrayal during the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), which linked the narrative to fascist ideals of masculinity and of sport as an instrument of the regime. In the early 1960s, authors Camilo José Cela, Rafael García Serrano, Francisco García Pavón, and Manuel Pilares incorporated the fury and failure narrative into several soccer-themed short stories. These authors looked back with nostalgia at the sport’s origins while criticising the darker sides of the modern game. The freedom of the short story to move in time and space reinforces football literature’s function within sports writing as a means of going beyond the action on the pitch and complicating a simplified story of winners and losers. Keywords Spain · Short story · Football · Soccer · Fascism · 1960s · Nostalgia

Introduction In a short story published in 1962 titled ‘La furia se va de viaje’ [The Fury Takes a Trip], Rafael García Serrano tells the tale of a dinner at a train-station restaurant just before a footballer named Pepote takes an overnight train towards his National Team debut. Everything around Pepote is imbued with the hyperbolic symbolism that often accompanies national sports teams. For example, an anonymous server at the restaurant, who feels a connection with Pepote because they both work with their feet, considers the player to be like ‘a flag, a muscular piece of national honour, something like a monument’ (García Serrano, 1962, p. 58). Although everyone’s A. L. Winkel (B) High Point University, High Point, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_6

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attention is on Pepote, at the end of the story, the narration shifts to the point of view of a football reporter who travels with the National Team, who has the pseudonym ‘Balonazo’ and is described as a ‘modest boy’ with a certain level of culture that often ‘leads to nausea’. As a journalist, Balonazo feels a happy and invigorating energy from the stadium crowd, and even club board meetings and federation assemblies fill him with delight, but his nauseous scepticism is especially set off by some very specific claims: … he could put up with all of it in good cheer, except for that nonsense that football was an escape valve, and he was once made bedridden because a politician who considered himself enlightened spoke to him about ancient Rome, bread, and circus. (García Serrano, 1962, p. 63)1

The story ends as Balonazo observes the people on the train platform say goodbye to Pepote with flowers, white handkerchiefs, their arms in the air, and cries of the fascist slogan ‘¡Arriba España!’ [Up with Spain!]. In the practical and sensitive reporter, this show of nationalism makes him want to retch. The fact that these outward expressions of nationalist fervour would cause nausea in a short story written by Rafael García Serrano, ‘who authored works that have defined Spanish literary fascism’ (Santiáñez-Tió, 2013, p. 208), is unexpected, but it is an indication of how several domains, including fascism, football, and literature, had evolved in Spain by the early 1960s. García Serrano was an ‘unrepentant Falangist’, a member of the Falange, an ultraright movement modelled on the Italian Fascist Party (Santiáñez-Tió, 2013, p. 208). Since taking power in 1939, the dictator Francisco Franco had consistently imposed periodic internal shifts among his regime’s ‘families’ so that political influence was never with one group for too long. By the 1960s, the Falange, which had provided ideological motivation for Franco’s base in the earliest years after the war, had long lost its most direct political influence. At the end of the 1950s, Opus Dei technocrats had implemented a massive’Stabilization Plan’ that would move Spain out of the autarkic isolation and agrarian economy of the first half of the twentieth century and stimulate one of the most aggressive global economic ‘miracles’ of the 1960s (Martín Aceña & Martínez Ruiz, 2007, pp. 34–41). The Falangists would continue to hold considerable power in the cultural sphere, however, as many national offices, such as Press and Propaganda, Tourism, and, of interest here, Sport, remained under the control of old-guard party members and their disciples (Payne, 1999, p. 432). Despite their efforts at control, however, Spanish football was evolving away from the strictest ideological uses of the sport in the early dictatorship to become a dominant cultural institution. In a similar sense, though literature and the press remained heavily censored, Spanish fiction was shifting from a current of social realism in the 1950s to a period of formal experimentation in the 1960s. Within this time of transition and adjustment, several authors, including García Serrano, Francisco García Pavón, Manuel Pilares, and Camilo José Cela, published football-themed short stories that captured the power of soccer as a cultural phenomenon. That García Serrano’s sports 1

All translations, including titles, are by the author unless otherwise noted.

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journalist would feel sick at the spectacle around the National Team player helps to illustrate the contradictions that surrounded the sport and what they can tell us about the conflict between tradition and modernity in Spain in the early 1960s. Though soccer was well established as a tremendous cultural phenomenon, these stories reveal a tension between a pure vision of the sport’s past and a more cynical side of corruption and outside actors that interfere with the players’ and the fans’ enjoyment of the game.

Fury and Failure in the 1960s The ‘fury’ in García Serrano’s title (‘La furia se va de viaje’) is a reference to a longstanding nickname for the Spanish Men’s National Football Team: La Furia Roja [The Red Fury] or, simply, La Furia. The typical national narrative told about Spain and Spanish soccer throughout the twentieth century is one of ‘fury and failure’. The historian Alejandro Quiroga has been the scholar who has most thoroughly examined how the narrative evolved, beginning at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics through to the Spanish Men’s National Team’s victories at Euro 2008, World Cup 2010, and Euro 2012. As Quiroga explains, the foreign press first used the image of the ‘Spanish fury’ to describe the ‘brutality and unsophistication of the Spaniards’ style’ at the 1920 Olympics, a style that for the Belgian hosts reflected the Black Spain legend of its seventeenth-century empire (2013, p. 21). Quickly, however, the Spanish press reappropriated the fury stereotype and attributed its footballing triumphs to traits that they could be proud of, such as enthusiasm, courage, an intense will to win, and a great love for the fatherland (Quiroga, 2013, p. 22). These personal characteristics were attributed to individual players, but then expanded to encompass the National Team’s distinct playing style, and, in the next step, the Spanish nation as a whole. The other side of the narrative, however, had to account for Spain’s international failures, and when the National Team did not perform as expected (as was usually the case until 2008), Spanish media were quick to blame external forces, including biased referees, foreign conspiracies, and just bad luck. Another easy scapegoat were foreign-born players, either in the professional leagues or on the National Team, who were easily blamed for diluting an imagined ‘Spanish style’. As Quiroga notes, by the time the dictatorship came to power in 1939, this narrative was ‘music to the Francoist’s ears’ (2013, p. 35). Falangist thought upheld a similar view of the ideal male that was present in Italian Fascism and German Nazism, with an added element of piety that fit into the Spanish National-Catholic ethos. As Teresa González Aja has examined, part of this stemmed from an attempt to make tolerable the physical and moral violence necessary for a fascist revolution. The figure that arose was the ‘monje-soldado’ [soldier-monk], who, in addition to virility and strength, was ‘composed of austerity, of a sense of sacrifice, but also an impassivity in the face of spilled blood’ (González Aja, 2005, p. 75). For the regime, this image fit well into its propaganda, and sport became another expression of its worldview. ‘Sport was to be where the masculine Hispanic values about which the Falange talked

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so much and so often, “virility, impetuosity, and fury” would be incarnate’ (González Aja, 1998, p. 109). The fury and failure narrative was not invented by the Falangists nor by the Franco regime, but it served them splendidly. Under Franco, national sport was governed, as most other things, by a centralised, hierarchical system. At the top of the hierarchy was the Secretary of the Movimiento Nacional, the National Movement, the only political party allowed during the dictatorship. Among the direct dependents of the Secretary of the Movement was the National Sports Delegation, the Delegación Nacional de Deportes (DND). The DND controlled the various sports federations, including the Spanish Football Federation (RFEF), which oversaw the professional league, the Spanish Cup, and the Spanish National Team. The first National Sports Delegate, Jose Moscardó, was a military hero of the Civil War and led Spanish sport through its ‘Blue Period,’ which lasted until the end of World War II. Blue was the colour of the Falange militants’ shirts, and under Moscardó, Spain’s National team shirts went from red to blue, and the fascist Roman salute and the Falangist anthem ‘Cara al sol’ were required at the start of matches. The Falange, like other international fascist programs, held sport and physical fitness to be central to its vision for a fit and ordered population (Krüger, 1999). In Spain, however, the nationalised sporting system dreamed of by Falangists never materialised under Franco because of a lack of, first, interest from the dictator himself, but more importantly, economic investment (González Aja, 1998, p. 107). Instead, the growth in popularity of professional soccer in the 40s and 50s brought more power to the clubs themselves. The immense popularity of this time made football a mass spectator sport and led to the third period, a time in which Spanish authorities recognised the power of soccer as an escape valve, useful in distracting the population from political matters. Though the reporter Balonazo in García Serrano’s story reacts violently to this notion, it has been widely recognised that throughout the 60s and early 70s, the regime broadcast exhibition matches and even reruns of past games on television to coincide with select dates such as April 30 and May 1, May Day, to distract Spanish workers from ‘more dangerous’ activities in the streets (García Candau, 1996, pp. 84–85). The dominance of football in the popular imagination of the 1960s and 70s was compounded by what Alejandro Quiroga has termed the ‘cumulative media effect’, by which evolving press technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (that is, newspapers and magazines, radio, newsreels, television, and now, the Internet) added to the array of methods through which fans could consume soccer in Spain (2013, p. 15). The cumulative media effect is another way to conceive of the cultural phenomenon that was summarised by 1989 Nobel Prize in Literature Camilo José Cela when he wrote of fans who ran out every Monday morning to buy the Hoja del lunes [The Monday Page], the only newspaper officially printed on Mondays between 1925 and 1982, to confirm in print what they had ‘heard on the radio and seen with their own eyes’, in order to later talk about it at the office (1963, p. 81). This observation, in the epilogue to Cela’s 1963 short-story collection, Once cuentos de fútbol [Eleven Football Tales], sets up a description of the football-obsessed Spaniard that has little time to do anything besides think about the sport:

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Several hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, perhaps several thousands of thousands, dedicate their energy on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to reviewing the plays from the match that just passed, and their free time on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday predicting the events of the match that is about to happen. On Sunday, they take a break and go to the football: to suffer or to relax, honestly, watching others suffer. (1963, p. 81)

Cela’s short-story collection appeared in 1963, one year after García Serrano’s collection. In his study of short story in Spain from 1944 to 2015, the critic Fernando Valls calls the early 60s ‘one of the sweetest moments in the history of Spanish short story’ (2016, p. 133). Perhaps unsurprisingly, in his list of notable collections from the decade, Valls omits both Cela’s and García Serrano’s football fiction. This may be because football fiction in the Hispanic world would not begin to boom until the 1970s (García Cames, 2017, p. 495), but it is also because sport literature is often overlooked. The role of literature is also left out of Quiroga’s ‘cumulative media effect’ framework, even though scholars such as Antonio Gallego Morell (1969), Rafael García Candau (1996), Timothy Ashton (2013), and David García Cames (2018) have established a tradition of what Ashton terms ‘kick-lit’ in Spanish literature throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The soccer short story deserves a place within the panorama of sport narrative because, whereas popular media can capture the excitement of the live sporting event in a more instantaneous reproduction of the action on the field, court, or rink, it falls to literature, no matter how tentatively, to present the reader with the sentimental aspects of sport and sport fandom. A broadcast may capture the moment, but it is sport literature that is left to inhabit the spaces ‘around’ the event, those that transport the reader to temporal and spatial dimensions that exist beyond the action. This easily leads to nostalgia. In sports reporting, the nostalgia comes as a trace of the event itself; the word must always come after the act. The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard recognised this when he wrote that, ‘when football is written about it is already over, and when the article is read there is no longer any value in the match; all that exists is the value of the writing’ (Knausgaard & Ekelund, 2017, p. 155). Sport literature, however, is not as bound to the event as journalism, and the sport becomes the background against which other dramas may be projected. As Lee McGowan has noted in the context of football and fiction, literature allows for the ‘quiet periods’ that are missing from the modern game (2017, p. 231). This is a nostalgic notion in itself; it appears that fans complain about the modern game no matter when they happen to live it. Both the epilogue to Cela’s short-story collection and the observations of García Serrano’s sceptical journalist recognise the hypnotic power of football over the ‘thousands of thousands’ of Spaniards who followed the sport in the early 1960s. Their texts, however, form part of literary projects that allowed the authors to complicate the meaning of soccer as a popular phenomenon. Aware of the role of journalism in the everyday consumption of sport and in the creation and propagation of the fury and failure narrative, Cela’s and García Serrano’s short stories, as well as those of several other authors of the period, permit them to break the limits of the lived sporting experience and transfer the sport to other times and places. That is, through their narrative fiction, these authors can reconstruct football in unfamiliar settings

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and situations that lay bare the meaning of sport in a changing society. The result is a series of stories that can at once look back with nostalgia to more innocent times and reveal sharp critiques of the challenges that the narrative of modern football often obscured.

The New and Old of Literary Football The writers of football short stories of the early 1960s were confronted with a sporting reality that greatly differed from what they had known as children and young men. Spanish soccer had become a mass social phenomenon, thanks in part to the international success of Real Madrid, winners of the first five editions of the European Cup (now UEFA Champions League) from 1956 to 1960, and to the Franco regime’s realisation of the power of sport in domestic and international politics and diplomacy (Simón, 2020, pp. 56–66). Long past were the days when Ernesto Giménez Caballero, first one of Spain’s leading avant-garde authors and later its most influential fascist ideologue, praised football for bringing modernity into Spain through the ‘invasion of the “the foreign” into our national customs’ (2000, p. 46). Writing in 1928, Giménez Caballero saw football as ‘an expression of the new, a modern and elitist sport’ that would ‘oppose the expired and retrograde world of bullfighting (García Cames, 2018, p. 52). By the 1960s, short-story authors like García Serrano, Cela, and Francisco García Pavón sought to recapture the thrill of when football was new by relying heavily on a nostalgia that, on the one hand, reproduced the novelty of the origins of the sport while, on the other, rejected its modern aspects. They too would often refer to bullfighting for contrast and to put soccer in terms that were relatable to their audiences. This was especially true when trying to frame the sport within the fury and failure narrative, whose positive traits often overlapped with the most laudatory descriptions of Spanish bullfighters. After Giménez Caballero, the next generation of authors searched for the new in football by returning to its past. In 1961, Francisco García Pavón published Cuentos republicanos [Republican Tales], many of which are told from the firstperson perspective of a child before and during the Spanish Second Republic (1931 to 1939). In ‘El partido de fútbol’ [The Football Match], the child narrator tells of the experience of attending his first match and trying to understand what he is seeing: ‘When a goal was scored, and it occurred many times—I don’t remember who won— the footballers on the team that scored hugged each other tightly, as if it were the first time that it had happened in their lives’ (García Pavón, 1961, p. 33). During the match, he comments on the movements of the players, the apparent uselessness of the referees, and the reactions of the fans, separated into economic and social class according to where they sit. The second half actually bores him: ‘I also thought about never going back to watch football in my life because I didn’t see the point to it’ (García Pavón, 1961, p. 34). To counteract this, the child puts the game in terms that he can relate to from the bullfighting world. While people go to the bulls looking for blood, ‘football makes the blood-thirsty yawn because there are no horses. Why

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would there be horses in football when the ones who run are men?’ (García Pavón, 1961, p. 30). At the end of the first half, he notices that the sweating and limping players are tired: ‘They acted like exhausted animals who could not look at anyone, and they ran as if hypnotised, like carousel horses chasing the ball’ (García Pavón, 1961, p. 33). As the narrator struggles to interpret what is unfolding before him, comments like these show the exertion necessary in athletic competition without labelling them as positive or negative. The innocence of the child observer reminds the reader of what it was like to see the sport for the first time. Rafael García Serrano’s approach to football’s past is stylistically like García Pavón’s. His collection, El domingo por la tarde [Sunday Afternoon] (1962), alternates between football and bullfighting in 12 short stories (eight about football, four about bulls). As Antonio Gallego Morell noted, ‘García Serrano succeeds in painting living watercolours of a footballing fandom as it currently exists, while always wrapping his prose in constant evocations of the past’ (1969, p. 93). The only story that obviously takes place in a much earlier time, however, is the first one, ‘La instancia’ [The Application], in which two young men present an application to create an athletic association dedicated to ‘foot-ball’, a word and a sport that the older bureaucrat who receives them does not understand. The narrator of the story, however, frames the origins of football in Spain as idealised exploits of youth: They liked to run, to know that they were strong and agile, to jump, to head straight into a collision, to hear the sharp slap of the foot against the ball, to smell the wet grass; they liked to sweat and to get soaked by the light drizzle; they liked the sun’s tremendous friendship and they believed they had to meet the cold face-to-face, without scarves nor face masks, nor breath that smelled of hot coffee with milk. Spain smelled of hot coffee with milk and they wanted it to smell of ointment, of young and skilled bodies. (García Serrano, 1962, p. 25)

As in Giménez Caballero’s early text, where the emergence of football was attributed to a ‘rejection of old values’ (2000, p. 46), football offers the promise of something new that breaks away from musty tradition and instils a realm of strong, muscular, jovial boys and men. García Serrano’s nostalgia also emerges in stories in which he looks back at the development of the game. At times, he depends on real figures of Spanish football history, as in ‘El delantero centro’ [The Centre Forward], in which an amateur player imagines himself called up to the Spanish National Team, made up of real historical stars of the 1950s. In ‘Herminio, el del bar’ [Herminio, the Barman] (1962), a former local star who now runs the refreshment stands at his team’s stadium dislikes the action on the field because he deems it mechanical and of poorer quality. The story begins with a long description of the time when Herminio played, when few spectators went to the grounds, ‘training lasted hours and hours and nobody organised it’, and ‘you could tell the vaguely professional players apart from those who weren’t because they showered under one of the railroad spigots’ (García Serrano, 1962, p. 86). In contrast, the narrator repeats, ‘now everything was different’, more standardised, controlled, and technical: ‘Newspapers now spoke of football as a sport and not as a curiosity or social event’ (García Serrano, 1962, p. 88). Herminio himself appears to be no longer interested in the sport other than in how much business it brings to his bars, but the story ends on a sentimental note as he hears ‘a music made up of

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metallic and solitary kicks, of young voices on field trips, of the splash of soda in wine bottles, of the loud and thick water from the spigots’ (García Serrano, 1962, p. 90). Herminio joins many of García Serrano’s characters as they capture a feeling of frustration at the way things are and a desire to return to the past. In contrast, Camilo José Cela’s Once cuentos de fútbol [Eleven Football Tales] (1963), published only one year later, avoids much of the sentimentality of García Serrano and García Pavón. Cela’s stories are on the whole more complex, as Gallego Morell recognised when he observed that ‘Cela does not deform reality, but rather he moves it. He may not start from the real footballers of his time, but he invents his own footballers, uprooted from geography and era’ (1969, p. 93). Rather than attempting to capture a lost soccer of the past, the atemporality of Cela’s football creates a more expansive nostalgia, one that takes in centuries of Spanish history by closely linking soccer to literature. Every story includes an epigraph quote from a notable cultural figure (Voltaire, Cervantes, Picasso, Disraeli, etc.) that is a guiding principle for the narration and one to which the author refers in the plot. This connection to literature over reality frees Cela to remove the ‘football’ from any concrete time or place so that it rather floats in an imaginary setting where soccer is only a pretext to other issues. His stories pick up on common elements of the fury narrative by isolating them in unfamiliar situations that have just enough football for them to be meaningful ‘football tales’. The characteristics of the Spanish fury—among them: bravery, courage, strength, and worship of the fatherland—become timeless traits of individual characters that border on the archetypal. For Gallego Morell, Cela’s prose brings these distorted figures into the realm of the esperpento developed by the early-twentieth-century novelist and playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán, a style that exaggerated the most grotesque features of a distressed population (1969, p. 92). For example, Exuperancio Expósito, protagonist of ‘El héroe’ [The Hero], is blind in one eye, has a hook in place of a hand, plays for the team of his asylum, but is praised for being balanced and for having a kind attitude that does not correspond to his menacing appearance (1963, pp. 47 and 50). Cela’s collection of eleven stories, prologue, and epilogue is organised into four mamotretos, which Ashton translates as ‘notebooks’ but which also connotes heavy, voluminous tomes (2013, p. 80). The fury themes are most present in the three stories of the second mamotreto, in which Cela highlights the risks that players take and the difficult payoff that comes from them when they and their teams become symbols of something larger than themselves. In ‘Retornelo del defensor de la ciudad’ [Ritornello of the Defender of the City], a ‘crazy hermit’ goads the goalkeeper of the local team, and therefore the city’s ‘defender’, Dominico Fernández, to ‘put yourself before your city’s gates and prepare yourself to die fighting, like a wolf, or like a gladiator who doesn’t know that he has a sister who is the king’s concubine’ (Cela, 1963, pp. 39–40). Like a bullfighter, Dominico Fernández must ‘put on the uniform of those who know that death is the prize for fighting’; and die he does. Rather than mourn his death, though, the townspeople parade him on their shoulders like a victorious bullfighter, all exclaiming that his sacrifice is his ‘glory’ and a cause for celebration. The symbolic weight of team and player is apparent in the next story as well, ‘Nostalgia de Ávila de los Caballeros’ [The Nostalgia of Ávila de los Caballeros].

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This story exposes the extreme identification between players and fans by focusing on Sancho Adajo, el Mozo [the Lad], who is only able to play football successfully ‘in the shadow of the walls’ of the Castilian town of Ávila (Cela, 1963, pp. 43–44). From atop the walls, two local clerics, his ‘fans’, yell at him with an extremely localised fandom. Though set in 1963, the clerics cheer on Sancho Adajo with an anachronistic language, encouraging him ‘to bombard with goals’ the ‘foreigners’ from other Spanish cities, to whom they refer as ‘luteranos’ [Lutherans], ‘volterianos’ [Voltairians], ‘franchutes’ [Frenchies], and ‘saracenos’ [Saracens] (Cela, 1963, p. 44– 45). As in the previous story, this extreme patriotism is also couched in the language of ‘glory’, a local glory, ‘which is the most immediate and tangible of the glories’ (Cela, 1963, p. 46). These anachronistic insults manage to mix religious intolerance of the Crusades and the Spanish Golden Age, anti-French nationalism of the early nineteenth-century, and always-relevant Spanish regionalism. The return to an idealised and innocent past is a common characteristic of football fandom and football literature. As David García Cames notes, ‘When corruption […] threatens to completely poison the playful content of football, the fan reacts by turning their eye backwards, by returning to that ab origine time when, they imagine, heroes were really heroes, when sacrifice, feeling, won over business’ (2018, p. 389). Coupled with the myth of the fury narrative, these nostalgic stories recreate the feeling of novelty and purity that readers can recognise when thinking back to their early experiences of the game. Yet, in other subtle ways, these stories undermine the fury narrative: García Pavón’s child narrator reminds us that even children can pick up on the struggles that come with athletic performance; García Serrano’s sentimentality is obvious and therefore less effective; Cela ties football fandom to the collective identity that sport can induce, yet by shrinking it to its most localised form also manages to expose its absurdity. This touch of the absurd and the unfamiliar is in fact under the surface of several other stories from this period and in these very collections, in which authors look at what the game had become in the 1960s with a scepticism that is not always shrouded in nostalgia.

The Darker Side of Modern Football Though they appear in the same collections and were written, in some cases, by the same authors, several short stories highlight a sharper criticism of football as it was in the early 1960s. Rather than contrast contemporary football with the imagined soccer of the past, however, these stories illustrate how corruption, greed, and cruelty were often masked by the notion of fury. In Alejandro Quiroga’s examination of the fury and failure narrative, the negative side reappears as a way to justify Spain’s poor performance at most international tournaments of the twentieth century.2 According to this view, failure was due to bad luck, unfair advantages by Spain’s rivals, and 2

One notable exception is Euro 1964, won by Spain over the USSR in Madrid and touted as a victory for Franco over communism. All the stories discussed here were published before that tournament.

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injustice in the form of biased refereeing. This ‘doom narrative’, as Quiroga explains, had its roots in the ‘regenerationism’ that followed the loss of the Spanish empire at the end of the nineteenth century, but it survived throughout the Franco dictatorship because it essentially put the blame on others so that the regime could frame failures, on and off the pitch, as beyond its control and the result of ‘international machinations and foreign plots’ (2013, p. 47). As an example, after a dismal showing at the 1962 World Cup in Chile, an angry article from the newspaper Marca clearly blamed the foreign-born players on the National Team roster: Even worse, the national team is now so full of foreigners and so conditioned by foreign tactics that it no longer plays like a team of real Spaniards, with passion, with aggression, with courage, with virility, and above all with fury. (Burns, 2012, p. 181)

In this context, Cela, García Serrano, and the leftist author Manuel Pilares wrote stories in which they reveal the darker side of football. While the fury narrative applauded the strength, virility, and patriotism of individual players, the stories of failure and struggle uncover the pressures that those expectations place on players who cannot live up to them. In addition, these stories take a sceptical view of those who manage and exploit players, especially agents, scouts, and club owners, who take advantage of them within a corrupt system. Cela addresses the failure that is inherent in the mistreatment of players in several stories in his collection’s first mamotreto, La lonja [The Marketplace] (1963), which deals directly with the commercial aspects of football. The protagonist of ‘Aplicaciones de la teoría del librecambio’ [Applications of Free Market Theory], Timolao López Laguna, alias Quincio Toledo, makes his living as a talent scout for a lower-tier football club. According to the text, he has made ‘at least twelve trips to the end of the earth’ to attempt to sign two foreign footballers, Pipí and Popó, the ‘Black Pearl’ and the ‘Black Diamond’, respectively (Cela, 1963, p. 22). The possible sale of their biggest stars greatly upsets the government and people of their unnamed foreign republic, who accuse the negotiations to be the work of undemocratic governments, international oligarchies, secret societies, and imperialism in general. For his part, Timolao López Laguna defends the deal with economic theories and the law of supply and demand, as well as secret meetings with the nation’s opposition parties. Cela goes so far as to call López Laguna’s players his ‘slaves’, whom he treats ‘lovingly, as long as they don’t grow a belly or take on bad habits’ (Cela, 1963, p. 23). His protagonist, directly involved in bringing foreign players to Spanish football, represents a modern system with savage echoes of the past. In these initial stories, Cela’s football players only exist as merchandise for others to buy and sell and hold onto as their value increases. The ‘owner’ of Estanislao, the Golden Ram, in ‘Fábula del carnero de oro’ [The Fable of the Golden Ram], insists that his player care for his own market value by giving him the following advice: ‘Conserve your energies and slam the heck out of the football and the enemy team’s defenders; you’ll have time to have fun once you turn forty’ (Cela, 1963, p. 32). The transactional nature of professional football is most pronounced in ‘El tratillo’ [The Little Deal], whose protagonist, Don Teopempo Luarco Novillejo, alias Pichón, has a chemical formula for embalming living humans to later sell them. He is said to

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have amassed a great fortune by embalming footballers and selling them to Hong Kong or to behind the Iron Curtain (Cela, 1963). Don Teopempo ‘imports soccer players like one imports diesel engines, and exports players like one exports citrus products. Everyone understands the deal and whoever wants to play can play’ (Cela, 1963, p. 27). Like the stories discussed in the previous section, these also exist in an undefined time; Cela treats these situations matter-of-factly so that, though they seem distorted and exaggerated, the reader can relate them to the realities of the contemporary sporting world. In the case of García Serrano’s collection, there is a noticeable sense of frustration at contemporary sport. As we saw in the previous section, ‘Herminio, el del bar’ (García Serrano, 1962) criticises modern football by comparing it with an idealised past of the player’s glory days. In several other stories, however, García Serrano shows that even when they are in their glory, few players can overcome their eventual fall from grace. García Serrano examines the commercial aspects of modern football in ‘El paladín’ [The Paladin] (1962), a story that mostly focuses on an agent named Teodosio Rubí, who hopes to negotiate the transfer of his most promising player, Lele, to an important club. Though Rubí brags that he is the one who has ‘invented’ the player and manufactured his rise to stardom (García Serrano, 1962, p. 45), he is concerned that Lele may be too valiente, that is, that he might play with too much pure and earnest energy and therefore put himself at physical risk. Rubí’s doubts materialise later, after the match in which Lele is scouted by another team. Though he plays well and the crowd cheers ‘as if it were at a bullfight’, the club’s director is not interested in signing Lele because he plays too aggressively, will spend too much time injured, and is a bad investment (García Serrano, 1962, p. 51). Lele’s characteristics as a ‘paladín’ would appear at first to correspond with the ideal traits of the fury narrative, but García Serrano instead shows that money’s influence on the game prevails over the myth of courage and bravery. To further explore the gap between the public expectations and the private efforts of the football player, García Serrano’s stories often include interaction between the press and athletes. Written before the expansion of television in Spain, the stories rely heavily on newspapermen and radio announcers, such as the journalists in ‘La vieja gloria’ [Old Glory] (1962), who know that their listeners ask little more from players than typical clichés and youthful memories. Of García Serrano’s collection, this story makes the strongest statement against the fury narrative while acknowledging its strength in popular discourse. In it, Juan Domínguez, a retired professional and national team player, gives a radio interview about his childhood and career. The story begins with a description of an album of press clippings kept by the protagonist as his career advanced from ‘academy prospect’ to ‘the impetuous Domínguez’ to ‘ace of the Fury’ (García Serrano, 1962, p. 148). Then, rather than transcribe Domínguez’s interview answers, García Serrano writes the player’s memories as interior monologues that reveal that his motivation for success throughout the years, when he was lauded for his aggressiveness and quickness, was fear: fear of his father, fear of his larger classmates, fear of the other players on the pitch (1962, p. 153). This fear motivates him to pass and to shoot quickly, which makes him appear aggressive on the field; he, on the other hand, attributes the many goals that he scored to simple

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luck. With these stories, García Serrano reveals the double face of fame and success and the falseness of the public persona in a society that celebrates a macho attitude when the private motivations are much more delicate. Finally, the paradox of the fury and failure narrative is present in another football story from the same period, from Manuel Pilares’s 1960 collection, Cuentos de la buena y de la mala pipa [(Un)Smokeable Tales3 ]. Pilares’s left-wing political background differs greatly from Cela’s and García Serrano’s, who both pledged allegiance to the Falange during the war; though García Serrano remained true to the movement throughout his life, Cela would later drift away from it. Pilares, an Asturian rail worker who opposed Franco’s regime, also wrote about football from a child’s perspective in this story, but in a way that reveals the violence, the falseness, and the cruelty that can lie beneath the stereotypes of the fury narrative. The title of the story— ‘Ese niño gordo a quien sus padres compraron un balón’ [That Fat Boy Whose Parents Bought Him a Football] —hints that these are not the innocent memories of childhood of the García Pavón story, ‘The Football Match’. Like García Pavón’s child narrator, this boy is described as ‘bored’, but it is a boredom filled with torment, as the other boys in his neighbourhood want his ball but not him, and do not allow him to play with them. Rather, he is forced to watch over the jackets that the others have set up as goalposts. Instead of the action and vigour of youth exhibited by his classmates who try to emulate the fury of their adult heroes, the narration states, ‘Fat boys whose parents buy them footballs are boys who are condemned to smile blissfully and shut up’ (Pilares, 1960, p. 39). This boy is anything but blissful, however, and he tries to get rid of the ball by deflating the life out of it and throwing it off Madrid’s Segovia Viaduct. However, when adults in the street believe that he has lost his toy over the viaduct’s railing, they collect money to buy him a new one. This ironic twist reinforces the cruelty of sport towards those who do not fit athletic norms, exacerbated when an entire national narrative is based on natural Spanish fury, virility, and strength. Pilares’s story is only three pages long, but its cruel irony makes it one of the most tragic of those examined here. These stories often recognise the stereotypes of the fury and failure narrative but manage to undermine them simply by complicating them. The narrative proposed by media outlets and government propaganda depend on Manichean views of victory and defeat, which create a strong sense of ‘us versus them’, integral to the experience of sport. These short stories, however, give space to their authors to show that the fury is not always so furious and that there are countless reasons for failure. If players and fans are treated as merchandise and only those of the best ‘quality’ have any value, then no amount of literary nostalgia will suffice to exchange current ills for an earlier ideal.

3

Thanks to Enrique Ávila López for suggesting this title translation.

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Transitions, on and off the Pitch In the years following the publication of these stories, Spanish football would continue to grow into the mass spectator sport that it is today. A foreign-player ban imposed in 1962, meant to improve domestic talent and to address some of the commercial abuses of professional clubs, would be lifted in 1973, opening the way for FC Barcelona to sign the sport’s first global superstar, Johan Cruyff. The Franco regime would officially end after the dictator’s death in 1975 and the signing to the new Spanish Constitution in 1978. The Delegación Nacional de Deportes (DND) would be dissolved in 1977 and replaced by the Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD), whose directors would report to ministries of subsequent democratic governments. Spanish soccer fiction, for its part, would begin to boom in the 1970s, thanks in part to the model of Latin American sports literature and the legitimisation among Spanish intellectuals like Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (García Cames, 2018, p. 80). As soccer literature began to gain some limited respect, authors could continue to explore the social, economic, and personal repercussions of Spain’s, and the world’s, most popular sport. Camilo José Cela, Francisco García Pavón, Rafael García Serrano, and Manuel Pilares did not necessarily anticipate the global game of today in their short stories, nor did they need to. Rather, they serve as a marker of a period of transition. Fully aware of where the game was at the time, they also looked back with nostalgia at an earlier time deemed purer. Though these authors held various political points of view, they were able to find a small place within the media landscape that shaped perspectives of the role of soccer in their contemporary Spain. At times, the sport represented a lost past, lyrically presented as the domain of youth, innocence, and vigour. In other cases, the stories underline the cruelty of the physical and commercial demands that society places on its athletes. Football literature has room for all sides of the story, an enriching and usually gratifying addition to the narrative.

References Ashton, T. J. (2013). Soccer in Spain: Politics, literature, and film. Scarecrow Soccer Series. Scarecrow. Burns, J. (2012). La Roja: How soccer conquered Spain and how Spanish soccer conquered the world. Nation. Cela, C. J. (1963). Once cuentos de fútbol. Editora Nacional. Gallego Morell, A. (1969). Literatura de tema deportivo. Colección Los tres dados. Editorial Prensa Española. García Cames, D. (2017). Gol y memoria: el fútbol en la narrativa en lengua española del XXI. Letras de Hoje, 52(4), 494–502. https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2017.4.26875 García Cames, D. (2018). La jugada de todos los tiempos: fútbol, mito y literatura. Prensas de la Universidad de Zaragoza. García Candau, J. (1996). Epica y lírica del fútbol. Sección Libros útiles. Alianza Editorial. García Pavón, F. (1961). Cuentos republicanos. Narraciones, 2. Taurus. García Serrano, R. (1962). El domingo por la tarde. Narraciones, 5. Taurus.

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Giménez Caballero, E. (2000). Hércules jugando a los dados. Biblioteca Golpe de Dados 20. Libros del Innombrable. (Original work published 1928) González Aja, T. (1998). Spanish sports policy in Republican and Fascist Spain. In P. Arnaud & J. Riordan (Eds.), Sport and international politics: Impact of fascism and communism on sport (pp. 97–113). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. González Aja, T. (2005). Monje y soldado. La imagen masculina durante el franquismo [Monk and soldier. The masculine image during the Franco regime]. RICYDE. Revista internacional de ciencias del deporte, 1(1), 64–83. https://doi.org/10.5232/ricyde2005.00105 Knausgaard, K. O., & Ekelund, F. (2017). Home and away. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Krüger, A. (1999). Strength through joy: The culture of consent under fascism, Nazism and Francoism. In J. Riordan & A. Krüger (Eds.), The international politics of sport in the twentieth century (pp. 67–89). Taylor & Francis Group. Martín Aceña, P., & Martínez Ruiz, E. (2007). The golden age of Spanish capitalism: Economic growth without political freedom. In N. Townson (Ed.), Spain transformed: The Franco dictatorship, 1959–1975 (pp. 30–46). Palgrave Macmillan UK. McGowan, L. (2017). Football and its fiction. In J. Hughson, K. Moore, R. Spaaij, & J. Maguire (Eds.), Routledge handbook of football studies (pp. 222–35). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Payne, S. G. (1999). Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977. University of Wisconsin Press. Pilares, M. (1960). Cuentos de la buena y de la mala pipa. Colección ‘Leopoldo Alas,’ 15. Editorial Rocas. Quiroga, A. (2013). Football and national identities in Spain: The strange death of Don Quixote. Palgrave Macmillan. Santiáñez-Tió, N. (2013). Topographies of fascism: Habitus, space, and writing in twentieth-century Spain. University of Toronto Press. Simón, J. A. (2020). Football, diplomacy, and international relations during Francoism, 1937– 1975. In H. L. Dichter (Ed.), Soccer diplomacy: International relations and football since 1914 (pp. 48–69). University Press of Kentucky. Valls, F. (2016). Sombras del tiempo: estudios sobre el cuento español contemporáneo (1944–2015). Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert.

Adam Lee Winkel is Associate Professor of Spanish at High Point University. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and completed his graduate studies at Columbia University. He has published articles on Spanish novel and theatre in Hispanic Studies Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, on Spanish football in The International Journal of the History of Sport, and on football in narrative in TEXT. His teaching and research interests include post-civil war Spanish literature and cultural studies, sport and culture, and urban theory and cultural practices.

“Air This Thin Turns Anyone into a Mystic”: Extreme Sport as Metaphor for Societal Disengagement in Steven Heighton’s Every Lost Country (2010) Angie Abdou

Abstract Steven Heighton’s novel Every Lost Country (2010) is based loosely on a mountaineering incident that occurred September 2006. After witnessing a shooting, climbers were forced to decide whether to attempt to help those injured or to continue their quest for the summit. The decision divided the party. This incident provides an intersection between politics and mountaineering, allowing readers to explore the ethics of extreme sport. Are the climbers obligated to act upon the injustice they witness? Should they abandon their own goals and expend energy to reduce the suffering of strangers? Is pursuing the climb self-indulgent? Are these athletic goals reduced to a means of disengaging from the troubling realities of the world? Are there any redeeming qualities of such disengagement? This single incident provides a microcosm in which to address the larger question: what is the draw of extreme sport, and does it always amount to a type of disengagement from the world? Can any value be found in this type of withdrawal? This paper draws on edgework theory to explore these issues in Steven Heighton’s Every Lost Country, arguing that creative writing allows a sustained and nuanced exploration of the complex relationship between societal obligation and athletic goals. Keywords Literature · Canadian literature · Extreme sport · Mountaineering · Edgework · Heighton

The opening pages of Steven Heighton’s novel Every Lost Country (2010) are based loosely on a mountaineering incident that occurred September 2006 in the Nangpa La, a high pass on the border of Nepal and the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. After witnessing a shooting, climbers were forced to decide whether to attempt to help those injured or to continue their quest for the summit. The decision divided the party. This incident –as rendered in fiction by Steven Heighton—provides an A. Abdou (B) Athabasca University, 1 University Drive, Athabasca, AB T9S 3A3, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_7

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intersection between politics and mountaineering that allows readers to explore the ethics of extreme sport in relation to societal obligation. Are the climbers required to act upon the injustice they witness? Should they abandon their own goals and expend energy to help reduce the suffering of strangers? Is pursuing the climb, despite what they have witnessed, self-indulgent? If so, are athletic goals reduced to a means of (and, in the context of the novel, a metaphor for) disengaging from the troubling realities of the world? Is unwavering commitment to extreme sport a way to detach from the responsibilities inherent in belonging to a civilised society? Does such disengagement have any redeeming qualities? This single incident provides a microcosm in which to address the larger question: what is the draw of extreme sport, and does it always amount to an irresponsible disengagement from the world? Or can some value be found in this type of withdrawal from society (see Abdou & Dopp, 2023)? Creative fiction—particularly the novel form—allows for a complex, sustained, and nuanced exploration of the relationship between athletic goals and societal obligation. When social scientists study risky sport as a means of subverting societal values, they use the term ‘edgework’ to describe activities that push the safety/danger boundary and offer a temporary escape from ‘social conditions that produce stunted identities and offer few opportunities for personal transformation and character development’ (Lyng, 2005, p. 6). Stephen Lyng argues that postmodern and post-structural theories are missing ‘any notion of the body as a site of potential resistance to cultural inscription’ (2005, p. 38). Through physical activity, Lyng and others argue, participants attain a nondiscursive realm, a space in which they are not imprisoned by language and their existence is not always already scripted. For example, Jackie Kiewa, in a study of one small group of climbers in Queensland Australia, argues that ‘climbing is depicted as a ‘free area’ in which climbers attempt to achieve relative freedom from this society’ (Kiewa, 2002, p. 145). Kiewa highlights the subversive— and authentic—potential of such edgework: ‘our identity, our true self, can best be discovered,’ she argues, by placing ourselves outside of mainstream society, and participating in dangerous activities is one way to achieve this authenticity (Kiewa, 2002, p. 146). This romantic interpretation positions extreme sport as a state of anarchy where social dictates are overthrown and individual freedom reigns. Jeff Ferrell puts forth such a view of all groups that engage in risky activities; he writes: ‘For as long as I can remember edgework and anarchy have wound around each other like a couple of desperate lovers’ (Ferrell, 2005, p. 75). Supporting this positive portrayal of extreme sport and the way it creates a space for practitioners to lead free and noble lives, athletes tend to attribute many benefits to their sports, such as: the realisation of humility and true courage; complete immersion in the world around them; an ability to live completely in the moment; and the attainment of a more authentic existence (see Abdou, 2009). In fact, authenticity is one of the key claims of edgework studies—that through engagement in risky activity, athletes rebel against the mainstream and attain an alternative, truer, less performative existence. Though Every Lost Country immerses us into the world of extreme athletes, it does so in a way that initially seems likely to demonise extreme sport rather than romanticise it. In the opening pages of Every Lost Country, a Chinese border guard

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shoots and kills a young Tibetan nun attempting to escape Chinese-occupied Tibet and cross the border into Nepal. At least two Tibetans are killed, several others wounded. The true event became international news only because a European cameraman on a climbing expedition happened to video the violence and post it on the Internet (see Douglas, 2006; Watts, 2006). Allegedly, the expedition partners argued about whether they should ignore the event so that they could, instead, fulfill their own climbing goals. The rest of Heighton’s story and all his characters are wholly invented, but that nugget of history provides the intersection between sport and society, as well as the ethical and philosophical issues that permeate this action-packed account of Canadian climbers, Tibetan pilgrims, and Chinese border guards. In Heighton’s imaginative leap from the 2006 conflict, the main character, Lewis Book, a member of Doctors without Borders, has travelled to Nepal to join a climbing expedition led by Wade Lawson, who aims to be the first climber to summit Kyatruk. When our Doctor without Borders representative ‘Lew’ really does ignore the border to fulfill his obligations as doctor, the climbing party is torn apart, and readers find themselves immersed in a terrifying and explosive pursuit. Wade Lawson continues in his extreme sport. Dr. Lewis Book abandons the athletic pursuit to engage in the world with an apparently selfless contribution to humanity. On an initial read, Lewis Book—the selfless humanitarian—is the novel’s hero. Book is defined by his desire to be good, to live up to the ‘doctors without borders’ ideal, to behave as if political borders and threat of personal harm have no meaning in the face of a fellow human bleeding. Lewis Book commits to never choosing sides, never judging, and always doing the right thing (i.e., helping others). In contrast, Wade Lawson appears the selfish athlete, ignoring others’ hardship to pursue his own ego-driven goals. The book’s opening page, however, hints to readers that Every Lost Country will not, in the end, support hard and fast—and easy—oppositions between good and bad. The first line reads: ‘Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic. Dulling the mind, it dulls distinctions, slurs the border between abstractions—right and wrong— or apparent opposites—dead and alive, past and present, you and him’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 3). Readers enter this fictional trek forewarned of the potential dissolution of the contrast between Book, the doctor who thrives in groups to the extent that his happiness is ‘umbilically linked’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 24) to others, and Lawson, the athlete so driven by ego and so socially isolated that even his lover does not really like him. Through the story, Wade Lawson is mostly referred to as Lawson and Dr. Lewis Book as Lewis. Of all the ways to designate two opposing characters, why would Heighton choose names as similar as Lawson and Lewis? Perhaps, this act of naming was Heighton’s own playful way to dull distinctions, to slur the border between the protagonist and the antagonist. On the topic of names, readers might also ask themselves: why did Heighton name his protagonist Book? No novelist puts a ‘Book’ in his book without carefully considered reasons. Lewis Book. Lew is Book. Perhaps, a man truly without borders—a man this unambiguously good—can only exist in the hypothetical world of a novel. As the plot unfolds, Heighton problematises this distinction between the good selfless humanitarian and the egotistical selfish extreme athlete. By the end, Heighton infuses the extreme sport with spirituality. Even Dr. Book recognises the Buddhist

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tendencies in Lawson’s athletic pursuits. The mountain becomes a kind of monastic retreat where Lawson can, in his own words, detach himself ‘from the world of predators’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 148). Ultimately, Heighton blurs the moral distinctions between these two men and does not offer any easy conclusions about the decisions each makes. Instead, Heighton creates a space to consider the many–layered meanings of extreme sport and human ambition, athletic and otherwise, and to both admire and critique the quests—any quests—humans embark to infuse their lives with meaning. Initially, though, readers are indeed invited to view the two men as polar opposites: good versus bad. Lewis Book is the man who, in his own words, ‘realises he owes something back to the world’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 94) and has dedicated his life to that repayment, whereas Wade Lawson seems ego personified. Lawson has hired a Canadian Asian woman named Amaris to shoot his ascent but finds fault with her ‘humble’ camera (Heighton, 2010, p. 11), as he calls it. Heighton allows readers this insight into Lawson’s thought: Kyatruk may not be the world’s tallest mountain, but it is a handsome rock with a tantalising history, one of the few worthy peaks still officially unclimbed, and Lawson feels the IMAX treatment, or at least the 35 mm widescreen, would do it better justice. It, along with him. (Heighton, 2010, p. 11)

Along with him: everything readers need to know about Wade Lawson, it seems, resides in that closing phrase. Lawson is the type of man who believes that only the IMAX treatment will do him justice. The link between mountaineers and their rendition on film has a long tradition. In a study of the evolution of mountaineering photographs taken between 1880 and 1920, Douglas A. Brown argues that: urbanites who transplanted themselves in the Canadian Rockies were wrenching themselves from their everyday contexts. Extreme experiences such as mountaineering were not intended to fracture identities. Rather, these mountaineers sought a deeper and more thorough sense of self by dissociating themselves from their familiar prosaic city lives. (Brown, 2007, p. 25)

These mountaineers believed that by escaping society, they could experience a truer and more spiritually enlightened version of themselves, through ‘self-reflexivity and heightened self-consciousness that this sport afforded the mountaineers’ (Brown, 2007, p. 20). This alternative existence with its quest for a true self has been linked to winter sport in the mountains for many decades: ‘Long before the cultural rebellion of the 1960s, people actively exchanged the American mainstream for the countercultural joys of a winter sport that gave them an enormous sense of freedom and release’ (Clifford, 2002, p. 13). Brown (2007) explores the role photography plays in this joy and the quest for authenticity, arguing that photographs were not merely reproductions of what mountaineers saw but also extensions of what they desired to see and feel. Brown (2007) claims mountaineers wanted to capture the grandeur of their landscape and the sublime, transcendental nature of their experience at its hypothetical best. Reflecting on the question of whether extreme sport is essentially an egotistical endeavour in which athletes absent themselves from society to pursue

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selfish goals or an admirable rebellion against mainstream society that allows individuals to live more authentic, less scripted lives, we can see how the desire to record the experience could support either interpretation. Brown’s (2007) description articulates the urge to capture the transcendental, spiritual nature of the mountain experience, perhaps in a celebration of the divine. However, if athletes were truly free of ego and the mountain pursuit truly does provoke a religious experience, would they need to capture it on camera? Might not that emphasis on photographs signal an ego-driven attachment to external approval and validation? Drawing on Victor Turner (1982), edgework theorists link the authenticity in extreme sport to flow state. When athletes become fully immersed in a demanding activity, they grow so intensely focused that they lose awareness of an audience. They are no longer performing or striving for praise and approval. They become one with the activity, fully in the moment, and truly themselves, present in their bodies. Awareness of the camera—the posing and audience implied, as well as the pulling out of the moment to capture the moment— detracts from the immersion, the flow, the immediacy—all qualities that edgework theorists associate with authenticity and unscripted, non-performative existence. In Every Lost Country, Lawson is almost always aware of the camera, the audience. The filmmaker Amaris is—for the duration of their time together on the mountain— also Lawson’s lover. When Lawson and Amaris argue, Lawson thinks: If this repartee finds its way into Amaris’s film, it might help show the world that he is not the humourless ego machine his critics make him out to be. Maybe his attackers’ problem is that they are not the directors of their own lives, so they hate the few people who are. (Heighton, 2010, p. 12)

Even in a heightened moment of conflict, Lawson cannot help imagining the response of his audience. He wants to project himself in a way that wins viewers’ favour, but then as if to reinforce the attackers’ view of him as an ego machine, we immediately discover that Lawson once read that men who ‘chew gum have stronger, more dramatic jaw muscles’ and he has therefore ‘taken up gum-chewing and has over the years left a trail of colourful chewed nuggets down the cordillera spine of the western hemisphere and high up in the Alps, the Caucasus, the Himalayas’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 13). Lawson is the director of his own life and its strong–jawed, heartthrob star—with all the posing and performance that those roles imply. He sees his extreme endeavours (which must be captured on film) as setting him above his contemporaries: ‘“Look,” he says into his radio phone, “I’m not down in the big city, like you! Things are never clear-cut above 20,000 feet and you people down there with your cellphones and Blackberries don’t get it”’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 82). When he looks away from his mountain and toward society, he does so with a sense of superiority and even contempt. Despite Lawson’s disdain for these city dwellers, his success is tied to them. His climbing goals are not about personal fulfillment, original experiences, or the satisfaction of individual accomplishment. He designs his life with an eye to impressing an audience. When his climbing party is torn apart, and it looks like he will be all on his own, his first concern is not for his safety or that he has made the wrong (selfish) decision. His concern is his disappearing audience. He worries: ‘If he summits alone

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again, who will ever believe him?’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 85). The reward is not in the pure idea of pushing personal limits and connecting with untouched nature, but rather in hearing the applause and seeing his name recorded forever in history, preferably with ‘the IMAX treatment’. Every Lost Country, then, does seem, at first at least, to invite readers to dislike Lawson, the politically disengaged athlete. Unlike Lewis who depends on connection to others for happiness and meaning, Lawson has true connection to very few characters in the book. The one exception in the expedition party is his nephew Zeph, the last to abandon him when the group splits. Lawson is alarmed by his own need in the face of the young man’s departure, by the way he, Lawson, must plead with his nephew to stay, even while he acknowledges (if only to himself) that this need has only to do with a fear that nobody will see him summit the mountain. Zeph explains his impending departure by saying: ‘Couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t help,’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 85). In the contest between achieving personal climbing goals and attempting to help in a humanitarian crisis, the young man chooses his obligation to society over his commitment to sport. Lawson warns him: ‘But you’ll have to live with giving up this mountain’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 85). Zeph replies, ‘I sort of feel like, you know … their mountain is realer’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 85). In his own (elliptical and somewhat immature) way, Zeph articulates that the Tibetan mountain, the doctor–without–borders mountain, is bigger than Lawson’s athletic goal of being the first to summit this particular physical mountain. Again, Heighton invites readers to contrast Lawson and Lewis, and the novel explicitly urges us to compare the two outlooks, the two ways of life, the two sources of motivation, the two mountains. Will the characters and readers prioritise Lewis Book and his socially and politically engaged mountain—the attempt to lessen human suffering? Or will we find some value in Wade Lawson’s disengaged mountain, the attempt to push physical limits and conquer the physical rock and thereby achieve personal fame? In the novel’s backstory, Lawson has lost an infant son, and the image of a still born boy runs throughout the text. Choked by the umbilical cord, the baby is, in the novel’s words, a ‘poor little climber, tangled in his own ropes’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 87). We might be tempted to see this blue baby as an image for Lawson himself, his under– developed emotional and intellectual life choked out by his own climbing ropes, so that he is the text’s stunted personality compared to the more highly evolved Lewis Book. But that distinction—that judgement—is too easy. Think back to the novel’s first page with the thin air and the emphasis on slurring borders between abstractions. That same section also calls for empathy, perhaps the main virtue of fiction—the way novels allow readers to put themselves in the minds of people different from themselves and climb toward understanding. The prologue of Every Lost Country addresses the reader directly: ‘Put yourself in [Lawson’s] boots if you can. Now say for certain what you’d have done, or will do’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 3). In light of this call to empathy, how can we imagine that the novel would outright condemn Lawson and his choices? With Heighton, we find ourselves in more challenging ethical terrain. We must remember that Zeph’s line—’I sort of feel like, you know … their mountain is realer’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 85)— comes in the mouth of an inexperienced young

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man. The way Heighton frames Zeph’s assessment with likes and you-knows and sortas should tip readers off to its overly simplified naiveté. The novel’s opening passage about thin air turning people into mystics and blurring distinctions between right and wrong recurs three times, with variations, in Every Lost Country. Heighton returns to it at almost exactly the midway point, again in Dr. Book’s point of view: Air this thin turns anyone into a mystic. You can see why Lawson succumbed to the mountain’s spell. It looks, even now, like a sanctuary above all borders and distinctions and this constant dialogue of violence – the sort of place where Sophie should have been safe, the sort of place that Tibet itself tried to be. (Heighton, 2010, p. 149)

Dr. Book elaborates here on Buddhism, leading readers to draw the parallel between the Eastern philosophy and his own global medical work: You’ve always felt an affinity for these Buddhists, in part because their faith replaces god and temples with the human brain and heart, but also because your own work, field surgery above all, is a sort of Buddhist practice, demanding calmness in crisis, a mind fixed on the pulsing moment an awareness of that mental wobbling into past failures or future fears can mean disaster. (Heighton, 2010, p. 149)

Book’s description of calm in crisis is remarkably similar to Victor Turner’s (1982) concept of ‘flow’, a state that extreme athletes use to explain the draw to their sport and its potential for transcendence. According to Turner, flow ‘denotes the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement’ (1982, p. 55), a sensation in which we have no sense of time or place and no self–consciousness but are instead completely immersed in the task at hand. In other words: we experience [this state] as a unified flowing from one moment to the next in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future. (Turner, 1982, p. 56)

Elizabeth Creyer, in an article called, Risky Recreation, posits three reasons for undertaking high-risk activity: normative (response to peer pressure), self-efficacy (need to feel competent), and hedonic (quest for a pleasurable or even spiritual experience) (2003, p. 242). Perhaps those who achieve the flow state fit within the third category, particularly the emphasis on spirituality, whereas those who have not managed to escape performative notions of identity fit within the first two. Wobbling can mean disaster—true in both field medicine and mountaineering. Entering flow state is crucial to—and a benefit of—both Lawson’s mountain and Lewis’s mountain. Within the novel, Lawson is first to recognise the similarity between himself and Book. The realisation comes to him unbidden. In fact, he is in the middle of a rant, denouncing Book, whom he perceives as a detractor. Lawson imagines Book dismissing him as a megalomaniac and thinks: ‘No one ever talks about micromaniacs – the critics, the mild hearted many, desperate to fit in and keep their heads down, who fail to climb their own mountains. They’ll never understand a Lawson’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 239). To bolster his own internal rant, he quotes Teddy Roosevelt: ‘The credit belongs to the man in the arena, who at worst fails while daring greatly’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 240). The rallying internal monologue, however, has the opposite effect Lawson intended:

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as he stares at the wall, insight comes, like a chock dislodged by some ghost climber high above, falling and striking his helmet: his colleagues are not just critics, they climb and risk as well. And Book and Sophie and Amaris – in serious danger of their own. (Heighton, 2010, p. 240)

This realisation is quickly followed by a second, larger (equally unwelcomed perhaps) truth: ‘There is a lie at the heart of every adult life. A buried self-deception that makes it possible to climb on’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 240). Every Lost Country eventually exposes, ‘Lewis the good’, and ‘Lawson the bad’, as equally untrue narratives. The belief in a fundamental difference between the two men—the idea that one way is better than the other, that one person is better than the other, that my way is the right way, my mountain the right mountain—that is the lie that fuels each of these characters. When Heighton’s readers retrace their steps in light of this epiphany and look for evidence of this blurring of boundaries between Book (the good selfless doctor) and Lawson (the bad egotistical athlete), it is easily found. Book himself recognises the Buddhist tendencies in Lawson’s extreme mountain pursuits: He ‘can see now why Lawson succumbed to the mountain’s spell. It’s hypnotic, unearthly. The longer you stare, the more it seems a refuge above all human borders and distinctions and this constant dialogue of violence’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 92). The mountain becomes a metaphorical monastic retreat that allows for useful, even admirable, withdrawal from human society. Lawson’s final experience on the mountain is indeed mystical: ‘“From here,” he thinks, “you could howl in God’s face”’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 148). Lawson’s last epiphany exhibits the kind of detachment from ego to which Buddhists aspire: ‘He has never felt so deeply peaceful as he does now—nowhere close. There’s nothing left to prove. There never was’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 276). Lawson’s climb, he recognises in retrospect, was not truly about proving himself for an audience. In those final moments, he re-reads his life and his life’s goals, and he renounces external validation and detaches from ego. If Lawson turns out to be not as bad as he seemed at first glance, what about Book? Is the good doctor all that good? Near the end of the novel, Book’s daughter makes clear the extent to which Book has hurt his own family while fulfilling his ambition (or, in the terms of the text, while single-mindedly climbing his own mountain). In a discussion about his marital breakdown, Book tells his daughter: Your mother told me I had to stop leaving, period. No more crisis postings overseas. She wanted me to work in admin, or with patients in the city if I still had to do outreach work. Street health clinics. Emerg, in Scarborough, with all the gang shootings. She said there’s a refugee crisis at home – in the Corridor, in the housing projects – and she was right, damn it, I knew she was, but I couldn’t stop leaving right then. It was just when – (Heighton, 2010, pp. 224–225)

His daughter interrupts him: ‘You blew a chance to bring us back together because you wanted to keep going overseas?’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 225). Book tries to defend himself: ‘It was just after the tsunami. I’d promised her, but they were frantic for doctors and …’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 225). The doctor’s weak protestations fall short when confronted by his broken-hearted daughter and his ex-wife’s strong argument

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that suffering people need his help right at home. However, Doctor Book cannot stop climbing his mountains any more than Wade Lawson can stop climbing his, even if the pursuit means hurting those he loves the most. Both men respond to the same impulse of giving themselves whole-heartedly to a goal in order to imbue life with meaning and bolster their sense of self, and self-importance, but also—in those occasional moments of transcendence—to lose themselves in the focused task and reach—temporarily—a state comparable to Buddhist enlightenment. Despite the similarity between the two men, one might still rank Dr. Book’s goals and pursuits superior to those of Lawson because Book helps—he makes the world a better place. However, the narrative highlights that Book also does damage. When he escapes from Chinese prison in an attempt to find his fleeing daughter, Tibetans are killed—people who might have been fine had Dr. Book minded his own business. Lawson’s criticism of Amaris’s desire to film Tibetans—’this is not your story’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 17)—applies equally to Book. In the end, does Book do more good than harm? Even Dr. Book doubts his ultimate effect. He expresses his doubt in a single line. In the middle of his most severe troubles fleeing Chinese border guards, he says to Amaris: ‘Harder to judge Lawson now, isn’t it?’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 302). Heighton subtly signals to careful readers that both men recognise their similarity to each other—Lewis to Lawson, Lawson to Lewis. Ultimately, the novel advocates radical acceptance of each other and each other’s mountains, as well as attempted detachment from ego—an ego that is equally manifested in Book (the good doctor) and Lawson (the megalomaniac climber). The detachment from ego, always the ideal to strive for, comes only in fleeting moments through immersion in flow state required by physical excellence (either on the challenging slope or in the medical emergency). In the midway repetition of the ‘air this thin’ passage, when Book explains the relationship between Buddhism and field medicine, just as he had earlier seen the Buddhist philosophy manifested in climbing, the similarity between the two pursuits is striking. Neither the mountaineer nor the medic can wobble. Both find calmness of mind in the physically intense practice. Such calmness—however it is reached—amounts a spiritual practice. The third and final variation of the novel’s ‘air this thin’ passage comes at the conclusion of Every Lost Country. In the novel’s final thin-aired (mystical) moment, Book realises that at best he can achieve, ‘gratitude for the gift of each connection. Each new moment’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 327). Lawson and Lewis have, by the end, connected in the realisation of what they have in common and in embracing their similarities. By the end, they have both dropped the contempt and judgment they had for each other. In Every Lost Country, we can see creative writing—the novel form—as its own high-altitude space that also blurs boundaries. At the start of the story, Amaris is Lawson’s lover, but when the party separates, a romantic and physical connection grows between Amaris and Lewis—marking another similarity and connection between the men. When Lewis Book and Amaris feel physically attracted to each other, they must defer fulfillment because they are sharing sleeping space with Book’s daughter. In this context, Book thinks: ‘Desire is a narrative that keeps you moving forward, even at a crawl, needing to find out’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 281). A description of romantic love, this sentence comes near the end of the novel, when

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readers are eager to reach the story’s conclusion but also keen to remain in the heightened fictional world for as long as possible. Every Lost Country thus confirms the assertion of narratologists from Robert Scholes (1979) to Peter Brooks (2022) that a reader’s desire is not unlike a lover’s desire. Reading has its own erotic of pleasurable delay. So too does life—Lawson’s desire to climb the mountain, Amaris’s desire to make the film, Book’s desire to help reduce suffering, a runner’s desire to get around a race track the fastest, a scholar’s desire to create the best argument for a given text—those impulses keep us moving forward. We all create our own mountains, and while Heighton’s novel privileges Buddhist philosophy in many ways, it does not ultimately advocate detachment from that desire. In those mountains—and our desire to summit them—we find a purpose and grant meaning to our lives. As Lawson reaches his ultimate summit (the summit to death), he observes: ‘The light fainter. There is no light, no dark either, just static grey’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 244). The text links this acceptance of grey—no black and white, no good and evil—directly to release, acceptance, and happiness. Lawson’s final epiphany suggests an ideal course of action: ‘To be happy, see yourself as entitled to nothing. Breathing without the mask, you crest a pass in your mind’s eye: there’s nothing up here but prayer flags’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 327). Tibetans believe prayer flags promote peace, with the wind carrying prayers and spreading good will and compassion to all. That compassion permeates the closing scenes of Every Lost Country—compassion from Lawson to Lewis and Lewis to Lawson, both learning to respect each other’s life choices. Every Lost Country assigns value to extreme sport as, at its best, a valuable disengagement from the political realities of society, similar to monastic retreat. Of course, an athlete, like a doctor, can pursue goals for the wrong, ego-driven reasons and can do harm in the process, but an athlete, like a doctor, can also (in those moments of intense focus) achieve an almost Buddha like calmness of mind and oneness with all. Through the novel, Heighton advocates radical acceptance of all these mountains (literal and metaphorical) and the life-affirming goals they create. Ultimately, in the face of society’s challenges, we should all do what we must to ‘climb on’ (Heighton, 2010, p. 240).

References Abdou, A. (2009). The Canterbury trail—A novel [Unpublished doctoral thesis]. University of Calgary. https://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/2956 Abdou, A., & Dopp, J. (Eds.). (2023). Not hockey: Critical essays on Canada’s other sport literature. Athabasca University Press. Brooks, P. (2022). Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative. New York Review Books. Brown, D. A. (2007). The modern romance of mountaineering: Photography, aesthetics and embodiment. The International Journal of the History of Sport, 24(1), 1–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09523360601005389 Clifford, H. (2002). Downhill Slide: Why the corporate ski industry is bad for skiing, ski towns, and the environment. Sierra Club Books.

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Creyer, E., William, R. T., & Evers, D. (2003). Risky recreation: An exploration of factors influencing the likelihood of participation and the effects of experience. Leisure Studies, 22, 239–253. https:// doi.org/10.1080/026143603200068000 Douglas, E. (2006, October 28). China draws a veil across the mountains. The Guardian. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/28/china.mainsection Ferrell, J. (2005). The only possible adventure: Edgework and anarchy. In S. Lyng (Ed.), Edgework: The sociology of risk taking (pp. 75–85). Routledge. Heighton, S. (2010). Every lost country. Knopf Canada. Kiewa, J. (2002). Traditional climbing: Metaphor of resistance or metanarrative of oppression? Leisure Studies, 21, 145–161. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614360210158605 Lyng, S. (Ed.). (2005). Edgework: The sociology of risk taking. Routledge. Scholes, R. (1979). Fabulation and metafiction. University of Illinois Press. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. PAJ. Watts, J. (2006, October 30). Death on Tibetans’ long walk to freedom. The Guardian. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2006/oct/30/china.worlddispatch

Angie Abdou has published seven books and co-edited Writing the Body in Motion, critical essays on Canadian Sport Literature. Her novel The Bone Cage was a Canada Reads finalist. Her two memoirs on youth sport hit the Canadian best-seller list. Booklist declared Home Ice: Reflections of a Reluctant Hockey Mom a ‘first rate memoir’ and a ‘must-read for parents with youngsters who play organized sports’. Abdou is Professor of Creative Writing at Athabasca University and a nationally certified swim coach.

Sport and Society in Creative Writing: Intersections with Practice

Write and Write It Again: Using Reflective Autoethnography and Practice-Led Creative Writing to Create New Narratives of Women in Sport Kasey Symons

Abstract Works of fiction that centre depictions of Australian Rules football aimed towards an adult readership are exceptionally rare considering the sport’s immense popularity in Australia. Representations of women are further limited in the sport literature, with only few examples of women authors also writing on the sport. As fiction is an important and productive way to explore complicated ideas, the few examples of women writing on Australian Rules football fiction we do have, offer many new ways to consider the sport’s place in society, but are restricted in their representations of women from a fan perspective. Sports sociologist, Stacey Pope has shown that most researchers of sports fans ‘seem to “add” women to their analysis, almost as a side-product to the main research focus, and perhaps as a response to feminist critiques or else the alleged rising numbers of female fans at matches’ (Pope, 2012). Thus, it is important to ‘add’ women’s voices and experiences back into sporting narratives and use the power of creative storytelling to unpack the gendered complexities and nuances women as fans of sport can experience. This chapter details a process of engaging autoethnography and practice-led creative writing to navigate positionality, lived experience, as well as challenge and reflect on the existing work on fandom to create sports fiction. This work extends on the existing literature to explore the use of creative writing to continue to add women back into the sports fiction discourse. Keywords Autoethnography · Practice-led creative writing · Sports fiction · Women in sport · Fans

K. Symons (B) Swinburne University of Technology, John Street, 3122, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_8

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Introduction This chapter explores the process of collating reflective autoethnographic writing in sports research (see Bruce, 2016; McParland, 2012; Nash, 2015; Richards, 2015) and practice-led creative writing (Smith & Dean, 2009) to create alternative sporting narratives that can allow for more nuanced depictions and representations of women’s experiences in sport, particularly as fans. This practice is primarily concerned with the ‘adding’ of women (Pope, 2012, p. 177) back into a discourse where representations of women in sport are still limited and women as fans even more so. When women as fans are portrayed in sports texts, it is mostly in a stereotypical or one-dimensional way, if they are indeed not ignored from the narrative completely. Though adopting this creative writing process, I will demonstrate how autoethnography and practice-led writing can work together to create considered representations of women who are fans of elite men’s sports, Australian Rules football in particular, to provide more nuanced portrayals of the many varied ways women can experience sport in different roles within the sport they love, as well as exploring the positionality of the writer and researcher. This process creates an autoethnographical progression of self-interrogation for the creative writer and researcher through an exploration of the self in the sporting narrative context. This is an important and productive process to give voice to those from different marginalised communities who are engaged and interested in the production and creation of sporting stories that reflect their own lived experiences. In a field where many diverse lived experiences are often omitted or overlooked in the literature, this approach works to ‘add’ stories as well as unpack cultural contexts. Diversifying sporting narratives is essential to driving more inclusion in sport and considering the many ways one can come to be involved in or enjoy sport. Those creating this kind of work can also benefit through the reflective practice of autoethnography to investigate their own position in the space and how their own experiences might have also been framed, shaped, and influenced by the sporting environments they have entered. This chapter will creatively address how some women can experience the sports fan space through concepts of gender performance (see Butler, 1990) and social surveillance through using autoethnography and practice-led creative writing. Here I show an approach to writing women in sport that allows for reflection of positionality, bringing together the lived experiences of the author and researcher as well as engaged participant in the space. Applying the lens of autoethnography as the primary methodology to examine these notions further allows me, in this case, as an active member of many sporting environments and a self-confessed fan, to explore the ways damaging gendered performances of fandom (Jones, 2008; Mewett & Toffoletti, 2011) can be for women striving for acceptance in the male-dominated sports fan space and for other women wanting to enter the space as well. A central aspect of this process is the mining of my own past and present as my football fan identity has developed and been shaped by the cultures that I am

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embedded in. Author and researcher Enza Gandolfo notes her approach to the craft of writing with reference to writer Joan Didion: For me, writing is first of all an act of exploration. Joan Didion puts it best when she says: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear”. (Gandolfo, 2014 in Symons, 2017)

This sentiment by Gandolfo and Didion captures the process I am engaging with through my own reflective work in this chapter. Through exploring the research on women as fans that I continue to analyse, and the reflective autoethnography and practice led creative writing I produce, I try to navigate the space to produce nuanced literary depictions of women in sport and understand my own experiences within a broader gendered context. My personal experiences in different aspects of the culture, as well as my own developments and understandings, provide insights into this complicated space and its impact on the relationships between women and sport. The autoethnographic reflections included in this chapter detail a specific moment as part of the broader journey I have been on as I continue to become the type of fan that I believe(d) would serve me best as a woman and supporter of elite men’s sport. My specific interest in this space is the representation of women as sports fans or women involved in the broader culture of sport in fiction, rather than a focus on the athletic participatory aspect, which of course is still an important and underrepresented narrative for women in sport fiction at an adult reader level. There has been a shift in emerging junior and young adult narratives that depict girls and young women as protagonists participating in sport which is extremely positive to see. But we are yet to see this translate through to adult fiction (see McGowan, 2020). The complexities with which women come to be passionate and invested fans of men’s sports, as well as how they experience and maintain their fandom in multiple, gendered, and complicated ways are still a relatively unexplored field, especially in sports fiction. I have loved football (Australian Rules) for as long as I can remember and have equally loved literature and reading. However, when I look to literature for sports narratives, I am left wanting. The experiences of women as fans are seldom explored in nuanced, creative ways that capture what I see and feel in the culture of elite male sports. Fictional representations of Australian Rules football for an adult audience are also exceptionally rare, with those written by women even rarer. At the time of submission of my own Ph.D. thesis (2019), only three such works were found that were written by women aimed at an older readership. These were The Whole of My World by Nicole Hayes (2013), Game Day by Miriam Sved (2014) and The Family Men by Catherine Harris (2014). Hayes’ text is considered to be young adult fiction with a high school-aged protagonist, however as she is sixteen years old and the book deals with some more adult themes, I consider it separate enough from other young adult texts written by women that focus on the participation of girls in sport and fighting gendered barriers to play. Melbourne-based journalist Ed Wright writes that ‘for something so culturally unique, Aussie rules football is under-represented in our literature, especially given the obsession with the game of our UNESCO City of Literature, Melbourne’ (Wright,

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2014). A lack of literature in this genre has also led to a lack of varied representations of the many experiences’ women can have in the Australian rules football environment as fans and consumers of the game. It results in the further perpetuation of narratives that neglect women as fans or fantasise them and maintains the male fan narrative as the central and most authentic experience, continuing a culture of complicity in the fan space that women must embrace for acceptance or face being othered and excluded (Symons, 2022).

Intersections of the Academic and Creative in Interrogating Sport and Society There have been a growing number of sports academics in recent years who have worked to bring autoethnography and creative practice into their research to explore the women in sport experience in multi-layered ways. Scholars are doing this to call attention to the lack of women in sport research, lack of consideration for intersectional perspectives and practice in sports academia and are developing creative outputs that give more women in sport a voice in mainstream media. An example of academic research that has produced a work of fiction is Toni Bruce’s, 2016 novel, Terra Ludus. Bruce’s creative endeavour sought to bring attention to the lack of media coverage of women’s professional sport, basketball in particular, through creating a fictional world where the women’s competition has been taken away. Bruce described her novel as follows: At its heart, it is an imagined world in which contradictory discourses collide and effloresce into new patterns that disrupt traditional ways of understanding the place of women in sport and media. Terra Ludus is my response to the spectacular failure of sport studies scholars and activists to convince the mainstream sports media to increase coverage of women’s sport. (Bruce, 2016, p. xii)

Bruce’s sentiment here rings especially true for my own processes in connecting the research method of autoethnography, analysing the academic literature, and producing something creative to align my experiences, reflections, and hopes for change for women in sport. I engage with forms of autoethnography to explore questions of how women fans enveloped in the patriarchal system of an elite male sporting code can perform and negotiate their gender and fandom, not only with men, but also in relation to the other women who enter this arena. More importantly, I consider how some women have come to believe that these performances are not just necessary, but also beneficial to their fan identities. These motivations and the complicated relationships they can create between women at the game are an important, yet relatively unexplored, fan experience for women and an experience I have only been able to unpack myself from my processes of writing and reflection of performing elements of my own fandom in this way.

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The method of autoethnography also enables me to engage with my own personal position in the field as a self-identifying, female football fan. As Meredith Nash notes a key feature of this process is ‘that the researcher’s narrative is “written in” to the research process’ (Nash, 2015, p. 4), and can take on a variety of forms such as evocative, emotional, and analytical (see Anderson, 2006; Chang, 2008; Sparkes, 2000). Nash advocates what they believe to be powerful benefits of autoethnography which embraces ‘the rejection of the “traditional” position of researchers as uninvolved observers in qualitative research and the possibility of inspiring others to reflect critically upon their own embodied experiences’ (Nash, 2015, p. 4). The use of autoethnography in this chapter draws on methods developed and deployed by researchers working in literary studies, sports sociology, and the cultural studies of sport. Megan Popovic, for example, uses autoethnography in her research on self-identity through sports fandom and participation in ice hockey by engaging with her personal memories, poetry, song lyrics, and theory (Popovic, 2010). Her intention in doing this was to share ‘memories from a first-person perspective, with the conviction that my stories will inspire the unveiling of a new way to do, or more so to be, history within our academic ice rink’ (Popovic, 2010, p. 236). Likewise, through my own process of engaging with this mixed-method, practice-led approach, I bring a different way of looking at representations of women as sports fans to creatively explore new ways of engaging with the research. Nash meanwhile uses autoethnography in her research into women’s participation in boxing culture as athletes in Australia. In response to criticisms aimed at the approach’s vulnerability to self-indulgence, Nash observes that autoethnography is, ‘important intellectual work because it permits an exploration of the personal and emotional dimensions of research and it is relational’ (2015, p. 4). I consistently find great value in studying fan culture around an elite male sport. Fandom is an emotional space where passions are foregrounded (see for example Klugman, 2009, 2012). Autoethnography allows the researcher to draw on their personal passions and broader emotional connections to a sport, in this case Australian Rules football, in a reflexive manner; one that augments analysis and more accurately situates the work within relevant fields of research and popular literature related to the sport. Jessica Richards (2015) also employs autoethnography in her research. Richards uses her lived experiences reflexively as part of her research in the fan culture of the English Premier League as both a female fan and a foreigner (an Australian coming into the English football fan space). By using an autoethnographical methodology, she shares the added complexities her position as an Everton fan brought to her project and identifies how that was also a beneficial addition to her research. Richards notes that her ‘status as a female researcher studying football fans often resulted in members of the Everton football community identifying my position in terms of my gender identity and sexuality’ (Richards, 2015, p. 393). Richards also highlights the ways her position and fan identity was able to serve her in building trust, understanding the dynamics of social spaces key to the fan culture, and connecting to other fans, thus her work importantly highlights how complicated navigating these environments is for women.

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The approach employed for this chapter is shaped by these styles and juxtaposed with a literary autoethnography. Their combination contributes to the production of my creative writing alongside production of my reflections. Richards writes about her gendered experience while researching football fans—she is researching herself, while researching others. Nash is researching herself primarily as a female athlete competing in a male dominated sport, assessing her gendered experience, and then analysing the setting in which she is a participant. Popovic also achieves this with personal reflections and thoughts on related song lyrics and poems that help her collate streams of consciousness to portray her research in a creative way. Bruce wrote a novel that called attention to the wider issues of gender inequality in basketball by presenting a fictional world where women’s basketball was taken away. I revisit past experiences with a new lens after becoming more aware of the ways in which I have been complicit in the patriarchal system that is the sports fan space of elite men’s sport. I explore pop culture references and examples, reflect on the research through autoethnographic inquiry. Then, I write again to produce a creative representation through practice-led creative writing (see Smith & Dean, 2009). Rebecca Olive’s (2013) discussion of her use of autoethnography also encapsulates a central element of the methodology for the work here. Olive worked to develop a reflexive methodology in her ethnographic research for her own Ph.D. thesis about women and surfing (Olive, 2013). In a follow up research article on the pedagogy of human movement studies, she highlights how researching her own community, culture, and subjectivity helped her understand the position she occupied in her research (Olive, 2018). Olive writes that the use of reflexive methodology helped her: feel the weight of my cultural difference in surfing, as well as my privilege, while accounting for the ways my difference is contextual, helped me locate any tendencies toward selfindulgence in accounting for my subjective position (Couldry, 1996). It helped me make the familiar strange. (Olive, 2018, p. 237)

Through my experience of writing in a reflexive, autoethnographic style, I also make the familiar strange like Olive (2018). I have also become aware of just how much of the strange I had made feel familiar in my own quest for authenticity as a self-identifying female fan. This process was difficult and shaming but illuminating of the ways in which I have also been compliant within the culture I critique in my research and additionally try to challenge through being an ambassador for women in sport.

The Writing Process Practice-led autoethnography is employed to explore my place in the space in a reflexive way. Practice-led writing, a process noted by Hazel Smith and Roger T. Dean, is an approach to writing where ‘the artist intuitively adopts the dual roles of the researcher and the researched in a “reflexive process”’ (Smith & Dean, 2009,

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p. 28). Autoethnography is defined as ‘an approach to research and writing that seeks to describe and systematically analyse personal experience in order to understand cultural experience’ (Ellis et al., 2010, p. 1). My Ph.D. thesis (2019) began as a response to reading the aforementioned published novels written by women that included a central Australian rules football narrative. My response to these texts was visceral and disapproving. I picked them apart. I thought they were inauthentic. Upon reflection months after my first reading of them, I challenged myself to re-think my reactions and interrogate my position. The approach, a critical re-reading of these texts, informed writing an Australian Rules themed novel titled Fan Fatale, through practice-led, autoethnographic creative writing, for my creative Ph.D. thesis One of the Boys: The (Gendered) Performance of My Football Career (Symons, 2019). An article I wrote for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature (2017), investigated my strong reaction to these texts through the lens of unconscious gender bias and the research pertaining to the cultural representation of women sports fans. I expressed that I was ‘reacting to these texts much as I have discovered female fans relate to other women in the sports fan space when they are in fear of being classified as “inauthentic fans”’ (Symons, 2017). While writing reflexively and developing my fictional narratives, I have been able to better understand the ways some scenes were informed and or influenced by historical representations of women in sport and current research on women as fans. The creative writing also informed my research and analytical work where scenes or dialogue I have crafted to hold against the research and explore why these situations occur. Autoethnographic interludes have assisted in deepening my engagement with practice and the academic work. I am better placed to provide experiential examples of navigating the field as a fan. This process led to comparisons between the research on gendered fan experiences and those of my experience of reading these texts. In a study of female soccer fans in the UK, Katharine Jones (2008) noted that her female respondents: looked down on female fans who practiced different versions of femininity and fandom than they did; these femininity and fan practices did not conform to their notion of correct attire, behaviour, knowledge, and desires. Their rejection of these ways of doing fandom suggests that the interviewees thought these women were not proper fans. (Jones, p. 529). Engaging with this research gave me pause. I thought more about my own position as a woman and a sports fan. How I had been framed by lack of exposure to narratives that not only portrayed women in sport, but portrayed their experiences in meaningful, complicated ways to further understand this space. A space I had not previously acknowledged, actively excluded women. A space that I had also entered blind to these issues and complicit in excluding other women in order to feel like I belonged. Why hadn’t I been exposed to the complexity of this space for women, and others who belong to any other intersectional and marginalised community, through the considerable volume of sports narratives I consume? After exploring the research and acknowledging my position within the field as a researcher and active subject, I moved into creative writing as research practice. By

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Research question

Engage with the research

Write

• Can women feel under surveillance while attending sporting events and how do women navigate being ‘watched’ while watching sport and trying to portray authentic fan behaviours?

• Existing research on sports fan culture, gendered experiences in sports fan culture, gender performance theory, unconscious bias, male gaze, surveillance of bodies, reading of various sport literature.

• Explore thoughts and experiences from my past experiences as a woman and football fan, reflections on portrayals of women in popular culture, reflections on literature and art outside of sport that catch my attention.

• Craft the fiction by bringing together my experiences, viewing them through the knowledge gained from the research and create a new story. Write Again

Fig. 1 Practice-led autoethnographic writing process

revisiting personal experience, analysing it through the lens of the current research and then crafting fiction to work towards answering a research question. I developed a writing framework to help me work through its processes. The following is a visual representation of my practice-led autoethnographic writing process that led to a passage of writing centred around the social surveillance of women as sports fans at sporting events (Fig. 1): Process 1 and 2 are discussed in prior explanation of my position and motivation to further explore my place in the broader sports fan culture, and in acknowledging how my bias towards other women has been framed in the sporting environments I’ve occupied and my engagement with the research. This chapter will now discuss processes 3 and 4. An example of the ‘Write’, process (3), is presented below in italics. The excerpts represent the flow-state of ideas, moving through thought, and engaging with research, examples of popular culture, and reflection on place and experience. Process 4, the creative response to the autoethnographic writing is presented in standard text to ensure the storytelling is clear.

Writing My Story A movie scene I think about a lot is a small scene from the 2010 Christopher Nolan film Inception (2010):

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Why are they all looking at me? Because my subconscious feels like someone else is creating this world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections start to converge on it. Converge? They sense the foreign nature of the dreamer. They attack like white blood cells fighting an infection. They’re going to attack us? No. Just you.

In this scene Ariadne (played by Elliot Page) is being trained to ‘build’ dreams for Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) who operates a service to extract information from the rich and powerful by covertly entering and manipulating their dreams. During her training, Ariadne enters Cobb’s subconscious with him as he teaches her. They walk through his dream of the busy streets of Paris and the people walking by them begin to focus intensely on Ariadne, staring at her overtly, knocking into her, their agitation growing at her being present in this space she does not belong. Ariadne asks Cobb why the people are reacting to her this way. He explains that the people walking are his subconscious, projections of his mind looking back at her, aware she is not meant to be there. She is an intruder. This scene is striking as it is a commentary on the ownership of space, belonging and the challenging of the status quo. The reason the projections start to pay attention to Ariadne is that she is changing things. As she continues to manipulate the space, the crowd descends on her violently and causes Ariadne to wake up, expelled from the dream land she has built. Watching this scene, I find myself unexpectedly triggered. I feel so connected to Ariadne’s experience but, on first watch, I didn’t know why. The more I thought about it, the more it felt related to my life as a woman who is a passionate Australian Rules football fan. When people ask if I like football, I correct them and say, ‘I love football.’ I’m not exercising my football fan-ness over somebody else’s in an arrogant way by stating this and I’m not being dramatic. I want to correct the assumption people have of my ‘liking’ of the game of Australian Rules football because, if I actually take the time to think about the exact wording of that question, ‘Do you like football?’— the answer is ‘no.’ I don’t ‘like’ it. When I think about how I’m feeling when I sit down to watch my team play, whether it be a live match in a stadium or at home on television. I’m sick. I’m nervous, anxious. True relief never comes. Only fleeting moments of it when a goal is scored and I can take a breath, but it’s never enough. Another one must be scored, and another. Even if we’re demolishing a team, it’s still not enough. We should have done more. Beat them by more. A win is also fleeting. The joy is momentary as the mind quickly shifts to the next game and the next. I’m always left wanting more, never completely satisfied. I ask myself how can I ‘like’ something that makes me feel so fundamentally awful most of the time?

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Because I love it. Matthew Klugman says, ‘[t]here’s something about Aussie Rules footy that is too much, that drives people to the edge of sanity. It produces suffering and joy, and an insatiable hunger for more’ (Klugman, 2009, p. 67). I say I ‘love’ football because to me, no other sentiment can encapsulate my relationship to it. It’s not because I am solely infatuated with it or find it idyllic and romanticise it (though I do definitely do this). ‘Love’ is the only concept which can explain why I actively participate in this culture despite being aware of the roles it forces me to play and the fan identity I have created that is in direct opposition to my feminist values. Love gives me license. Carrie Brownstein in her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (2015) says, ‘[t]o be a fan is to know that loving trumps being beloved’ (Brownstein, 2015, p. 3). A phrase that is repeated in romantic comedy films is, ‘you like because, and you love despite’. This phrase, though clichéd, as well as Brownstein’s quote, highlight the fundamental flaw with my fan relationship. I love the game so much, too much. Despite everything I don’t like about it and don’t like about myself when I am participating within it. The love keeps me complicit. My love holds me back from calling out the behaviours at the game that I find appalling. My love keeps my awareness of the other participants in the sports fan space limited, despite all of my reading and research on it, it has still not allowed me to develop a consideration to the intersectionality of other women’s experiences as fans. My love is so singularly focussed on myself, on my position in the game, how I can be more accepted, that I still look at other women and question their place. And in realising this I know why I find that scene in inception so triggering. In Ariadne’s terrified face I can see my fear in not wanting to be seen as an intruder in the fan space. I want to stay safe and comfortable in the stadium and enjoy the game I love. But in the crowd who converge on her and cast her out, I can also see myself trying to push someone else out. I can see my gaze put onto other women like me, women who just want to participate and be accepted in the sports fan space like I do. But in my complicity to perform under the male gaze I don’t let them. I can see the dual roles of internalising the panoptic gaze and then shining it on others exposed in this small moment in the film. And I feel shame to see myself in both positions. I want to walk into the sporting arena like Ariadne walks into dreams with the bravery and boldness to change things. I want to continue to build on my sporting experience by working hard to change the perceptions of the place of women and make it better for all of us. But the fear of being expelled from the place I love, from people converging on me and telling me I don’t belong paralyses me and instantly become one of the oppressors. I force myself to forget that there is an issue at all. That I’m wading through research from years ago and things are not like that now. I’m thinking about it too much. Things are different this post #metoo world where we finally have women playing the game in a national Australian Rules women’s competition that launched in 2017 that I am loving following. Things are better now. This stuff doesn’t matter anymore and what I’m writing about doesn’t make any sense. I don’t have anything

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to complain about. I know I belong here, right here at this stadium. No one cares that I am here or that I am a woman. I am just watching my team play and I am happy. I let the happiness of being in the stadium wash over me and I forget. There is nothing but the game I love. I am standing behind the race gripping the railing as I sway nervously, unable to sit as the seconds count down and I hold my breath waiting for the siren to confirm a West Coast win. A man taps me on the shoulder and pushes his phone in my face. ‘For my Snapchat!’ he winks. I felt so stupid that I didn’t tell him no. I was right in the middle of my Ph.D. research and I knew what he was doing, I knew how he saw me in that space and I still did nothing. I was also at that match with someone I was dating at the time who had gone to grab a drink when it had happened. This person was not a football fan and I was trying to let football win him over by taking him to a game and having him experience its greatness. When he returned he saw the man running off, he asked me what was going on. I didn’t tell him about it. I was too embarrassed. I changed the topic back to how great football was. All I did was wave at the camera lens with a complicit smile and wake up.

Writing Again “I guess I don’t get it.” Nick mumbled through a mouth full of pillow as sleep’s heaviness worked overtime to dissipate in the late morning sun. “It just seems pointless.” Hungover, and still too sleepy to challenge him, Kelsey let the comment hang in the air uncontested, something foreign to her. She would not usually let such an attack on her favourite thing in the world go so easily. ‘Pointless’. It was such a blow. She could usually handle when some of her friends told her it was too brutal or boring or they just didn’t like it. But ‘pointless’? Did that mean Nick thought her passion for it was ‘pointless’, that she was ‘pointless’? Kelsey and Nick had only recently met on Tinder. It was an interesting match that Kelsey didn’t think would pan out and she swiped right for a laugh. Nick was covered in tattoos, wore bands t-shirts of punks she’d never heard of and had a long-red hipster beard. He was just too cool. Too unreachable for a vanilla marketing coordinator and sports lover like her. She knew she was basic, but she liked to try to prove that she wasn’t always boring. She could date a musician. She could go to underground gigs. She could party with punks at a house party where the bathroom had no door. She could be that cool girl that Nick seemed to be looking for. But Kelsey didn’t really know what Nick was looking for. She just knew he was nice and paid for really expensive Uber Eats deliveries to eat in bed while they recovered from wild nights out. Nick just liked fun and was looking to have a good time. Kelsey was along for the ride, desperate to prove the rigid woman she’d become in her last relationship was dead and buried. She could be this cool, up-for-anything, fun person. But there was a part of her she’d never let go. Her love of Aussie rules and the love of her team.

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She tried to play it cool. “That’s fine, you don’t have to come with me, I’ll head off in about an hour.” She cooed stoking his hair. In his half-sleep state, Nick looked softer with his tattoo-sleeved arms covered by a white comforter and wrapped around her under the covers. She loved this carefree and crazy person she was able to be with Nick. She was out at bars she’d never go to and meeting people she’d never talk to. She wore a leather jacket and black jeans and felt like she belonged. But she knew at the heart of it, it wasn’t real. This Kelsey wasn’t who she really was, but she was grateful that Nick was allowing her to be the Kelsey she wanted to be sometimes. She was only beginning to realise who that was, or wasn’t, while she was lying in Nick’s arms. She knew this experience would be fleeting and Nick wouldn’t last forever. He was a stop along the way and she got the sense that he was more than happy to be this person for people. Freewheeling and fun. But hiding this part of herself a bit longer, this crazy football fan that, to be fair, she had been fairly forthcoming about on her Tinder profile, but had since neglected to circle back to. That was a version of herself that she didn’t really want Nick to see. “I think I want to come”. He whispered. “I want to see why you love it so much.” She smiled and loved how open to new experiences Nick was and she knew how lucky she was to meet someone like him on the dumpster-fire app that was Tinder. She was also smart enough to know people like Nick were not looking for long-term love, and she just needed someone to get her sparkle back since she lost it with her ex. But she wanted to keep the process of finding it ongoing as long as possible. She bit her lip with a bit of fear about how taking him into her fan arena might impact that. She closed her eyes and relaxed into Nick’s comfortable embrace and thought of the tattoos on the arms that held her, his black-painted fingernails and piercings, how they would look in the stadium. How would people look at him? She grimaced at herself for thinking of him like this. She didn’t care. And she didn’t want to him to think she cared. Shame came across her with a truth that she tried to keep buried about the thing she loved. That it was not always the most beautiful of spaces. As much as she loved football, and being in the stadium and watching the team she loved, that the game didn’t always love her back. “I think you’ll be bored, just stay in bed and I’ll come straight back after the game.” “Nah, let’s do it, I’ll jump in the shower.” He kissed her on the forehead and she let the weight of it sink into her skin. Like she needed to savour it in case it might be the last. Kelsey had packed her team-coloured jacket in her overnight bag. She had her team beanie and a scarf, and some socks, and some badges. She thought about what she should wear while Nick showered. Normally, it would be everything, but she didn’t want to seem too much, too embarrassing to be with, next to Nick in his allblack. She opted for the jacket and beanie. She couldn’t fight off all her fan identity. He smiled condescendingly at her as he emerged in his skinny jeans and band tee. Kelsey felt the sting in that smile, and he pinched her cheeks like a child and kissed her on the forehead again. She wondered how he really saw her. She was something

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to keep him entertained she thought. A different kind of girl than the rock chicks she assumed he dated. A novelty. They caught the train to the stadium and Nick teased her, asking different dumb questions about the game and joked he would support the other team. She played around with him and was only serious when she said he would be dead to her if he went for the opposition. He took the hint and eased off, sensing her begin to tense with some anxiety as it got closer to game time. Kelsey felt his shift towards her. It felt like he was allowing her to be her authentic self and she felt relief. Relief and immense guilt that she shielded some of herself, a really important part of herself, not only from Nick but from her idea of what a true fan is. She felt some kind of shame in letting down her team by not being her whole fan-self when a guy she liked spending time with who didn’t love football entered the picture. She hated girls who changed for guys. She was not going to be one of them. She let the happiness of being in the stadium wash over her and forgot anything else. If her time with Nick was at an end, it was at an end. Kelsey forgot she was there with him for a short while as she watched her team run out and score some early goals. She forgot about what he looked like and what she looked like in their respective uniforms of self-identity. She was who she was, and she was sharing something she loved with someone else. She was sharing herself with someone else and she felt real. This was who she was. “I’m going to grab a beer, want one?” “Sure.” Nick made his way to the bar at the halftime break and Kelsey felt at home. She was pretty sure Nick was having a good time. She was sure he appreciated that she was having a good time and that meant more to her. She could just be, in this place she loved, she could just be and she was happy. Kelsey stood behind the race, the spot she’d managed to convince Nick was prime viewing but was really just where she wanted to be as she liked to pace during the game and white-knuckle the railing if the score was too close. She didn’t often sit down at the footy. As she waited for Nick, someone from behind tapped her on the shoulder, expecting Nick and a delivery of poorly poured beers in plastic cups, she half smiled as a random man pushed his phone in her face and jumped in for a selfie. “For my Snapchat!” he winked at her. Kelsey smiled in complicity and shock. She didn’t immediately realise what had just happened to her. She panicked about what that guy was going to do with the photo and why he taken it. Because she was a woman alone at the footy? Was she part of a cruel joke? Did she look weird? Was it what she was wearing? She didn’t have long to think about it because Nick was back with the beers and a puzzled look on his face as he watched after the guy. “What was that?” He asked as he offered her a drink. “Nothing.” Kelsey went into damage control. She needed to protect Nick’s experience at the game. “Thank God you got here with these, I need a drink to calm the nerves for a big third-quarter! We need to lift!” She sipped on her beer as she tried to think of less cliched sporting expressions to spat off in a rapid defence of fans of football. She was in panic. What had just happened? Did that just happen? Did some

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guy really just come up to her and take her picture and run off laughing? It didn’t feel real. But her hot red cheeks felt real. Nick put his arm around her. “It’ll be ok, Kels, I’m sure your boys will win for you babe.” He kissed her cheek. She wanted to challenge him, this was not how you spoke to a fan, you never know that it will be ok! She wanted to ask him how many times her team had won after trailing at halftime this season to make him think it would be ok? How would they continue to cover for their captain who was injured last week and his presence seriously missing in their backline today? She wanted to speculate about what the coach would have said at halftime and if she was the coach, what she would do. But she just melted into his side as he put his arm around her shoulder and watched her team return to the field. She just wanted Nick to see why she loved this game, she just wanted him to get it. The siren sounded and Kelsey’s team had won. They’d pulled through to cover their depleted backline and got away with the victory. She smiled in relief and Nick kissed her in celebration. He grabbed her hand and sillily tried to sing the team song of which he knew zero of the words too loudly. She wanted to tell him to stop as she noticed eyes of the exiting crowd glancing to him. In that fleeting moment she noticed how triggering darting looks were. She asked herself again, confused in her own recent memory and how ridiculous it was, did someone really take a photo of me? Nick said he’d shout them champagne at the bar across the road to toast her team, and her success in getting him to the footy. She stopped herself from rolling her eyes at his self-confident flamboyance. He really didn’t care what people thought of him. Who goes to get champagne after the footy? Kelsey smiled at Nick and thanked him for coming. She wished she could feel as free as he did, strutting away from the stadium in his all-black ensemble, flicking his wrists trying to conduct the team song still blaring through the speakers, nailpolished fingers on full display, having a great time. This was her place, her stadium, her sport. How did she feel so exposed and alone and he was having the time of his life? But she knew it didn’t matter. She would be back again next week, cheering on her team, wearing her club colours, finding her spot in the stadium to pace out her anxiety until the final siren. It was pointless to keep thinking about that one idiot, that one moment that ruined it all for her today. Pointless to let that distract her from how much she loved the game. Pointless.

Conclusion Stacey Pope has shown that most researchers of sports fans ‘seem to “add” women to their analysis, almost as a side-product to the main research focus, and perhaps as a response to feminist critiques or else the alleged rising numbers of female fans at matches’ (2012, p. 177). Women are most certainly not a side-product to my research,

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but I am ‘adding’ to the discourse in what I hope is a more meaningful way than the researchers that Pope is critiquing and challenging in her own important work. Through the short narratives I have presented in this chapter, I seek to highlight some voices who have been underrepresented; I am adding questions to the field that must be considered and I’m adding myself. Much in the way some women writing on sport have done to further highlight issues of gender, family, and career in this field for women (see Abdou, 2018; Leavy, 2010), in this ‘adding’ to the research field of exploring the complexities and multi-layered experience of women who are fans of elite male sports, I will continue to understand my place in the stands as a fan. In first understanding my place through engaging with the research and authoethnographical, practice-led writing, I can illuminate a greater understanding of the complicated experiences of sports fandom some women can encounter. The two pieces of creative writing in this chapter, the autoethnographical representation of connecting literature, pop culture, reflections, and research alongside a creative, practice-led and structured short story show an example of how complex and nuanced the fan experience can be for women in sport. This method allows for the exploration of the minutiae of the fan experience that is often overlooked, excused, and tolerated in some elite men’s sports, but when unpacked, can greatly impact the cultural experience for women, and other diverse and intersectional communities who want to be part of the sports fan experience. Creative writing and narrative storytelling are so powerful in portraying the human experience and we need more diverse and intersectional storytelling in sport to continue to add more voices to shape more understanding.

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Dr. Kasey Symons is a Research Fellow in the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Her work focusses on women in sport, fan culture, sport media and literature and sport and social impact. Kasey is also a sports writer and co-founder of the women in sport media platform, Siren Sport.

The Queen and the Clown: A Poetic Inquiry into Women’s Roles in Rodeo Christina Thatcher

Abstract As a sport and cultural phenomenon, rodeo celebrates the history of the American West and upholds the myth of the cowboy. Over the years, as cowboys have taken centre stage, the history of women in rodeo has been largely hidden (Forsyth and Thompson, Journal of Sport and Social Issues 31:394–416, 2007). However, those women who do enter the arena often occupy a contradictory position—that of the feminine athlete. In this self-reflexive chapter, I will discuss the process of using Poetic Inquiry (PI) to understand the roles of the rodeo queen and the (female) rodeo clown—two athletes who are often overlooked in the arena. Two lyric poems I have written will then be used to explore the contradictory expectations placed on these roles as well as the challenges that meeting these expectations might pose for the women inhabiting them. At the centre of this chapter is an attempt to understand what it means to be a rodeo queen and a female rodeo clown in a sport dominated by men and how poetry might serve to document their dichotomous positions in the arena. Keywords Rodeo · Rodeo queen · Rodeo clown · Poetry · Poetic inquiry

Grand Entry: A Brief Introduction Rodeo is one of the fastest growing and most dangerous sports in the United States (Graveland, 2011; JHREA, 2019). The Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA) has sanctioned over 650 rodeos across the country with countless more operating independently (Graveland, 2011; About the PRCA, 2021). Although professional rodeos include a variety of events—such as bronc riding, steer wrestling, barrel racing and calf roping—it is bull riding which, arguably, draws in the biggest crowds (JHREA, 2019). These events are said to represent the practical range work of the 19th-century cowboy (Russell, 1970). Most are won with a combination of speed, C. Thatcher (B) Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_9

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strength, and agility. Essentially, the cowboy who can stay on the longest, and rope the fastest, wins. As an institution, rodeo celebrates the historical roots of the ranching and agrarian lifestyle (Weninger & Dallaire, 2019). It offers a stage where the image of the ‘white, masculine, American cowboy is created, recreated, and glorified’ (Forsyth & Thompson, 2007, p. 394). It is now this ‘courageous, risk taking cowboy’ who has become a ‘permanent fixture in Western lore’ (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 26). The contributions made to rodeo by Latinos, American Indians, African Americans and women have now been: rendered invisible in favor of a largely all-White all-male history that fits the Western myths and notions of Manifest Destiny, which, in part, rationalised westward expansion of the United States and helped create the popularised image of the cowboy that lives on today. (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 9)

As poetry, folklore, and western song demonstrates, the women in cowboys’ lives are ‘found in the background; they are joked about, sung about, and all too often forgotten’ (Forsyth & Thompson, 2007, p. 395). Although the ‘long and colorful history of women’s involvement in the rodeo has been largely hidden’, there are still women competing and fighting for equality in the arena today (Forsyth & Thompson, 2007, p. 395). Within the patriarchal culture of rodeo, women often occupy a contradictory position—that of the feminine athlete. At times, ‘they function as decorative objects subordinate to men’ while at other times they are positioned as strong and independent horsewomen (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 182). Sometimes, women in rodeo simultaneously occupy both positions allowing their roles to become ‘fertile ground for examining social re/presentations of gender’ (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 182). As a poet, rider, and long-time rodeo fan, I have always been interested in women’s roles in the arena and in the ways in which their history has been altered or erased. In 2022, I wrote an article which considered how poetic biography might help to acknowledge the complex history of women in rodeo and attempt to capture the dual roles that female rodeo riders must play as both women and competitive athletes (Thatcher, 2022). While writing these poetic biographies, I became interested in how other women occupy the arena as rodeo queens and rodeo clowns. This self-reflexive chapter will discuss two poems I have written which attempt to understand the roles of the rodeo queen and the (female) rodeo clown in the arena. I hope the poems themselves will offer a glimpse into the contradictory expectations these roles set for women as well as the challenges that meeting these expectations might pose.

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Discovering Through Poetic Inquiry As part of my poetry-collection-in-progress, currently entitled Breaking a Mare, I am writing a sequence of poems that consider women’s roles in the rodeo arena. After researching and writing several poetic biographies of women rodeo riders (Thatcher, 2022), I began to consider the role of other women in the ring, most notably the rodeo queen (who is always a young woman) and the rodeo clown (who is rarely a woman).

Data Collection and Data Analysis Research for these poems started simply by seeking to understand the history of these roles in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first century. I soon discovered a long lineage of queens but very few female clowns. Instead of targeting specific women to celebrate, as I did with the poetic biographies (Thatcher, 2022), I wanted to understand how the roles of the queen and clown functioned within the ritual and sport of rodeo. In order to do this, I read a variety of source materials, which included newspaper reports, interviews, and exhibition notes from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. I also read dozens of academic journal articles, chapters, and books, which discussed the history, function, and symbolic nature of these roles within rodeo. To my surprise, there were even a few romance novels, which included rodeo queens, such as Rodeo Queen (Kline, 2013) and Enchanted by the Rodeo Queen (Curtis, 2020), as well as women rodeo clowns, like Thom (James & Smith, 2021) and Finding the Road Home (Radcliffe, 2020). This research created a huge amount of data that I needed to analyse and synthesise. To do this, I turned to Poetic Inquiry (PI). Monica Prendergast put forward the term ‘poetic inquiry’ to encompass the diversity of ways in which researchers in anthropology, education, literature, sociology, and medicine use poetry as a means of research (2009). It is important to recognise the balance which is required between the two aspects of this methodology, that PI requires the creation of ‘aesthetically pleasing/evocative poetry’ by engaging in ‘critical inquiry’ (Vincent, 2018, p. 50). Adam Vincent states that Poetic Inquiry is an ‘artistic practice carried out within a research framework that cannot and must not diminish the critical/aesthetic qualities of these kinds of poems as poetry’ (Vincent, 2018, p. 50). According to Sandra Faulkner poets and social scientists ‘share some commonalities in their approach’ since both are ‘self-reflexive’ and ‘ground their work in meticulous observation of the empirical world’ (2019a, p. 41). Rather than conducting a thematic analysis on the data collected, for instance, PI allows researchers to use historical and archival texts, as well as personal experience, to represent their findings (Faulkner, 2019a; Poindexter, 1998). Faulkner (2019a) notes that poets’ reasons for engaging in archival, historical, and interview research as the basis for their poetry range from:

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desiring to use and create a voice beyond the individual, wanting to explore intersections between the personal and the historical, wanting to take the role of “poet as archivist or activist”, to the use of poetry as resistance and to write what is missing or “unlanguaged” in dominant discourses. (Faulkner, 2019a, p. 51)

All of these reasons rang true for me. As a woman, rider, and rodeo fan, I wanted to learn more about women’s roles in the arena. As a poet and researcher, I have been asking questions about the ways in which poetry might expose and challenge the expectations placed on rodeo queens and clowns. I hope the poems I have crafted reflect these tensions—that is, my interest and my status as an insider/outsider as well as the questions emerging throughout the research process.

Feminism and Poetic Inquiry Poetry, and Poetic Inquiry, has also had a long history of being used as ‘feminist practice’ and continues to be considered an important methodological option for feminist research (Faulkner, 2018, p. 23). In particular, poets can use their work to raise awareness of gendered experiences and give voice to feminist ideals (Faulkner, 2018; Reed, 2013). T.V. Reed states that poetry is ‘feminist practice’ because it is ‘particularly well equipped to challenge crucial dichotomies: the separation of private and public spheres, and the split between emotion and intellect’ (Reed, 2013, p. 89). Dean Young (2010) notes that the strength of poetry is that it joins conversations but refuses easy resolutions: ‘a poem asserts itself as poetry by being in dialogue with what it resists’ (p. 38). Laurel Richardson (1993), inspired by Mary K. DeShazer’s (1986) feminist writing on power and language, states that ‘a poem as “findings” resituates ideas of validity and reliability from “knowing” to “telling”’ (p. 704). She states that all researchers’ ‘writing is suspect—not just those who write poems’ because we all write within a ‘masculine system’ (Richardson, 1993, p. 704). However, unlike traditional research writing, the poem has the ability to ‘challenge the language, tropes, emotional suppressions, and presumptive validity claims of masculinist social science’ (Richardson, 1993, p. 704). Patricia Leavy also wrote that poetry, as a form, ‘brings attention to silence (or as a poet might say, to space)’ and highlights the ‘fluidity and multiplicity of meaning’ (2015, p. 66). For these reasons poetry seemed the perfect way for me to document and resist the expectations placed on women’s roles in rodeo, allow space for the unsaid, and draw attention to what has been forgotten.

Constructing Lyric Poetry as Research When using Poetic Inquiry, the type of poems written should reflect the research aims. Some researchers choose to compose narrative poetry which is often used to provide an insight into participant stories while lyric poetry focuses more on

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emotional representations (Leavy, 2015). Because I have focussed on the roles of the rodeo queen and clown, rather than on the lives of the women who inhabited these roles, I chose to write two lyric poems. Faulkner states that a lyric poem is constructed through ‘the use of imagery, rhythm, sound and layout to concretise feelings and relay those feelings back to an audience through the creation of the experience’ (2019a, p. 218). As readers of lyric poetry, we ‘either assume the role of the speaker in the poem, or of the one who is spoken to’ (Ribeiro, 2009, p. 69) which establishes a bond and creates its own kind of ‘intimacy’ (Simecek, 2019). I hope that the two lyric poems I have written—through their musicality, pace, structure, etc.—can open a door for readers, invite them to inhabit these roles and answer a question I have been asking myself: what does it feel like to be a rodeo queen or rodeo clown? Other poetic inquirers who use archival and historical work to compose lyric poetry have ‘raised concerns of truth, representation, aesthetics, research ethics and voice’ (Faulkner, 2019a, p. 214). I felt this too, particularly when considering what it meant to write into these roles, and reveal the patriarchal expectations placed on women inhabiting them, while still acknowledging that not all women would respond in the same way. Some women may, for instance, feel a sense of pride and reward when fulfilling the role of the feminine rodeo queen and may be complicit (rather than resistant) in upholding the patriarchal expectations inherent within this role. Faulkner notes that it is important to recognise the ‘partiality of the story’ through poetry since ‘point of view is conditional’ (2019b, p. 226). She states that poets may rely on ‘narrative’ or ‘poetic truth’ where the ‘facts’ which are ‘presented should ring true, regardless of whether events, feelings, emotions and images “actually” occurred’ (Faulkner, 2019b, p. 226). As a researcher, I used these poems to offer insight into the complicated nature of these roles but recognise that women who have been employed as rodeo queens and clowns may not all identify with my representation. Faulkner notes that writing ‘a layered text with explicit context, theory and methodological notes surrounding poems’ can help to address these concerns (2019b, p. 214). This is something I aim to do throughout the rest of this chapter.

All Hail the Queen Rodeo cowgirls were among America’s first ‘successful female professional athletes earning national headlines and top dollars in premier rodeos of the 1920s’ (Lecompte, 1989, p. 27). From the very beginning, the role of the American cowgirl was complicated by the dichotomous expectation that these women needed to be both ‘strong and independent’ as well as ‘feminine and sexy’ (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 139). This tension has followed every woman into the arena, even in the late 1920s when there was a huge decline in the number of cowgirls competing. This was due to a variety of factors, including economic pressure brought on by The Great Depression,

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the death of cowgirl Bonnie McCarroll, and the establishment of the Rodeo Association of America (RAA) which led to the banning of women from certain events (Laegreid, 2006; Oliver, 1994; Wells, 2013). While cowgirl athletes were being forced out of rodeo, a new group of ‘cowgirl look-alikes were welcomed with open arms’—the rodeo queens (Savage, 1996, p. 95). Their job was to ‘add a little charm and glamor to the testosterone-soaked world of male athleticism’ (Savage, 1996, p. 95). These ‘new queens—educated, poised and from socially prominent families—concentrated their efforts on promoting rodeos…. For nearly the next twenty years the socialite queen dominated popular conceptions of rodeo queens’ (Laegreid, 2006, p. 44). Like the cowgirl, the queen also held a dichotomous position in the world of rodeo: A rodeo queen, like a beauty queen, must embody patriarchal prescriptions of beauty and femininity. Like a beauty queen, the perception of a rodeo queen is generally locked within a representation which signifies femininity at its highest level. However, to become a rodeo queen, the contestant must also be an accomplished equestrian athlete and performer. She must be articulate and knowledgeable of professional and amateur rodeo, veterinary science and current events. She is most likely college-educated or bound, with defined career goals. She must possess qualities which, at least “traditionally,” suggest contradictory roles. (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 183)

The first recorded rodeo queen, chosen by her community, was crowned in Idaho in 1935 and the Miss Rodeo America pageant was established in 1955 (Laegreid, 2006). The criteria for winning ‘this prestigious title—horsemanship, appearance, and personality—encouraged a standardisation of rodeo queen contests throughout the West’ (Laegreid, 2006, p. 17). While the rodeo queen must demonstrate athleticism and equestrian skill, many argue that they are selected, predominantly, for their beauty (Burbick, 2007; Tice, 2012). Once appointed, rodeo queens must ‘adhere to guidelines in dress, behaviour, and public image; the rodeo queens’ primary responsibility is to represent the association as part horsewoman, part ambassador, and part beauty queen’ (Rock, 2021, p. 15). Being a rodeo queen means ‘being on the road almost every weekend, traveling between events. It also means fundraisers, meeting sponsors, rodeo banquets’ and more (Schweizer, 2021, p. 1). Queens must also be present at rodeo events to complete the ‘Queen’s Run’, a ceremonial gallop around the arena, sometimes while holding a large American flag (Rodeo Ambassadors, 2022b). Queens may also be asked to complete other duties, like herding steer and calves away from the arena between ‘real’ rodeo events (Ford, 2020). Even though rodeo queens are expected to be athletic and demonstrate good horsemanship, their role is, ultimately, to be beautiful but in a very different way to the beauty queen whose body is openly positioned as an object of desire (Burbick, 2007). The rodeo queen herself is not a ‘spectacle to be consumed’, instead she: adds “color” and “pageantry” to the rodeo, more like the women of the high trapeze in the circus or the costumed performers at the fair, than the beauty queen. The spectacle is always larger than the rodeo queen’s body; it includes the woman, her horse, her fashion, flowers, flags, her own personal style of adornment—in combination. (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 189)

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The queen’s role in professional rodeo is as a symbol of rodeo itself. She performs as something ‘beyond herself’ and, in doing so, she ‘exemplifies cultural codes of femininity’ (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 188). As a researcher and poet, I was particularly interested in the weight of these expectations. What must it take to uphold these feminine ideals? How might it feel to have your beauty valued over your athleticism? My poem, The Rodeo Queen, attempts to answer these questions: The Rodeo Queen

pretties for pageants first speaks to her people in the language of sequence long-flowing hair pink lipstick she knows the rules the same rules every woman knows but her reward is bigger a kingdom an arena a stage where she cascades in opens the rodeo perfectly formed her horse an extension of her body she keeps strong enough to hoist the flag gallops fast enough for it to wave the crowd cheers the crowd whistles the crowd agrees she is a good girl a good American girl by the grace of God she slows and is safe waves blows kisses mouths thank you to the crowd thank you thank you the crowd follows her out to the streets flashes their cameras she keeps smiling how could they know what this has taken from her how hard it is to follow all these rules of prettiness and muscle how could they know the open wound of her mirror the deep cave of her barn how could they know how could they The opening lines of this poem offer an insight into what the queen must do to win the pageant and earn her title. Words like ‘pretties’, ‘sequence’, ‘long-flowing hair’ and ‘pink lipstick’ highlight the value placed on her beauty. Later in the poem, words like ‘strong’, ‘gallop’, ‘hoist’ and ‘muscle’ demonstrate the flipside—the expectation that the rodeo queen should be a skilled, equestrian athlete. In lines 8–9, I’ve also shown how her athleticism can be demonstrated through the relationship to her animal: ‘her horse an extension/of her body’. Michelle Gilbert and James Gillet (2011) note the importance of recognising a well-trained horse as an athlete in their own right. In this poem, the ‘extension’ indicates the queen’s connection to her horse—through equestrian skill—and offers her an escape from the ‘prettiness’ of the pageant world. This joint performance, with her horse, clearly distinguishes the

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Rodeo Queen from beauty pageant winners. She can be attractive, but she also must be a skilled rider and proficient with her animal (Burbick, 2007; Laegreid, 2006). In this context, the rodeo queen’s performance ‘can reflect an individual woman’s dissatisfaction with prescribed gender roles focused on femininity’ (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 189). This dissatisfaction with gender roles and expectations noted by Shields and Coughlin (2000) is also something I tried to highlight in the poem. I attempted to do this with lines like: ‘she knows the rules the same rules/every woman knows’ and: how could they know what this has taken from her how hard it is to follow all these rules of prettiness and muscle These ‘rules’ seem to be placed on the queen’s body which is required to be ‘slim’, ‘beautiful’, ‘graceful’ and ‘athletic’ (Shields & Coughlin, 2000); her age, usually between 18 and 27 years olds (Miss Rodeo USA, 2022); her ‘education’ and ‘social class’ (Laegreid, 2004); and her personality which should be ‘friendly’, ‘sincere’, ‘approachable’, and ‘obviously enjoying herself’ (Rodeo Ambassadors, 2022a). In most pageants, the queen must also be unmarried and if she gets married, or becomes pregnant during her reign, she must forfeit her title (Manawarodeo.org, 2022). Lorri Neilsen says that poetry allows the researcher ‘to enter into an experience in the only way a researcher can (regardless of method)—as herself, observing and recording. She does not presume to speak for another’ (2008, p. 97). Although I am sure there are some rodeo queens who find these ‘rules’ acceptable, I cannot help but find them oppressive. As a researcher and poet, I thought this was important to capture through the repetition of ‘rules’—noting that ‘every woman knows’ these kinds of patriarchal expectations—and by showing ‘how hard’ they are to follow. The two metaphors at the end of the poem—‘the open wound/of her mirror the deep cave of her barn’—also offer an insight into the hours (and the pain) a rodeo queen must spend trying to meet these dual expectations as a beautiful, feminine athlete. In contrast to female rodeo riders, the rodeo queens ‘appear for the crowd’s viewing pleasure, reflecting the patriarchal dominance of the rodeo’ (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 15). This was something which struck me throughout my research, that the queen is beholden to so many people: the community, the pageant judges, the rodeo organisers, and the crowd. In my poem, I repeat ‘crowd’ five times and demonstrate how important it is for the queen to please them, placate them, thank them. Even when she’s tired after her performance, the crowd follows her out to the street, ‘flashes/ their cameras’ and she must keep smiling. For women, feeling that pressure to uphold a duty or obligation and to perform gratitude, correlates with patriarchal expectations (Stampone, 2018, p. 198). Americans live in a patriarchal system and women are socialised to do these things, ‘the crowd’ may not be fully aware of the ways in which the rules that queens are meant to follow serve to uphold this system (Sultana, 2012). I’ve tried to capture this in

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the last lines of my poem—‘how could they know/how could they’. On one hand the organisers, judges, crowds, etc. might not know how difficult it is for queens to emotionally, mentally, and physically meet these beauty and athleticism standards. On the other hand, they may know and may realise that this role is serving to uphold patriarchal ideals, in which case: ‘how could they’ do this to the queens? Some modern rodeo queens work to ‘fulfil the male gaze’ and ‘sell commodities’ (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 130). Of course, the queens themselves are expected, as I write in my poem, to be ‘good American girls’ and refrain from acting in an overtly sexualised manner. However, this pursuit of femininity can often ‘lead to disenfranchisement; it is a “set-up”’ (Bartky, 1990, p. 72). Upon achieving this ‘feminine appearance, women in sport are then sexualised, trivialised and devalued; “not taken seriously” and “seen as objects to be gawked at or made fun of”’ (Krane, 2001, p. 121). This can be seen in the way that rodeo queens have become ‘a sexualized and fetishized symbol, which eventually gave way to the cheesecake, pin-up, and sex kitten cowgirls’ (Patton & Schedlock, 2012, p. 130). Although it might be natural to assume that the queens are complicit in upholding these patriarchal norms which have led to their sexualisation, Renée Laegreid (2006) states that it would be: a mistake to consider these women as passive participants in the rodeo queen phenomenon, caught in a web of demeaning feminine roles. Rather, the queens were active and willing participants in the complex and diverse manifestations that the position provided. (p. 3)

Although the Queen does, in some ways, exists to be looked at and desired, there is much more to her role. Shields and Coughlin (2000) state that: The rodeo queen’s body is an active athletic body, and although she may be positioned in the rodeo to-be-looked-at, the athleticism of her performance denies complete objectification.… She participates in feminine masquerade as much, if not more, than she participates in traditionally inscribed codes of femininity. (pp. 199–200)

Rodeo queens are uniquely positioned to provide insight into the ways that women negotiate their space and feminine identity, both inside and outside of the arena (Burbick, 2007). The ‘performative aspects of rodeo’, which the queens take part in, offers an opportunity to ‘examine questions about gender, identity, community, and the connections between each of these topics’ (Shields & Coughlin, 2000, p. 183). This conception of the Rodeo Queen as a role defies easy definition. Although my poem explores some of the challenges a queen might face, I am also interested in what is left unsaid in this poem and beyond it. To this end, the white space left between and around words is just as important as the text. Poet Sasha Pimentel (2017) states that ‘a word, an utterance, can be a violent thing’ and adds that: if whitespace is “powerlessness,” the poem’s virtue is in its lament against such powerlessness. The line, rippling into whitespace, says: this is unbearable, what is happening is unbearable and I cannot change it—and in so saying, knows: all I can say is that it is unbearable. (para. 20)

As a researcher, I felt a pull to communicate the dichotomous expectations placed on the queen. Although I wouldn’t say these expectations are ‘unbearable’, the words I chose spoke to the emotional and physical challenges women might face in upholding

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them. However, the white space in the poem is allowing for something different. The white spaces between words and around lines leaves room for the voices of queens who have inhabited this role and leaves space for what I—as an observer—have gotten wrong, left out, or kept silent. Including white space also positions the reader as a researcher too, specifically as a synthesiser of information: We can’t help, as readers … putting together the separate frames into a coherent or continuous experience. For the mind is not only analytic but synthetic. White space is where the words it frames resonate with contextual, associational, and emotional meaning. (Budd, 2022, para. 15)

Poetic inquiry focuses on the poetic functions of language and the idea that ‘“aesthetic writing is the inquiry” with the goal of creating a relationship between that of the knower and the known’ (Faulkner, 2019b, p. 218). Writing this poem has allowed me to demonstrate connections between the knower (myself as a researcher) and the known (the queen), the writer (myself) and the reader (you), the subject (the queen), and the crowd as well as the dichotomy within the women who inhabit this role as both athletes and beauty queens.

Send in the Clown Ever since the Rodeo Queen was established, women have inhabited this role. However, the Rodeo Clown, which has also been a longstanding role in rodeo, has historically been held by men. This raised questions for me: why do so few women take up the role of the clown? What expectations might women face in this role? The job of the clown is usually twofold: to provide entertainment during and between rodeo events, and to ‘fight’ the bull. In bull-riding events, cowboys may be thrown to the ground and be too disoriented or injured to get out of the arena; it is the rodeo clown’s job to attract the bull’s attention so the cowboy can safely escape (Liming, 2012). Of course, once the rodeo clown has the bull’s attention, they also need to ensure their own safety. This means that clowns may try hide inside a barrel in the arena; stand as close to the bull’s side as possible, staying in its blind spots, until it can be corralled and taken back to its pen; or even try to escape the arena by climbing over the fence. This is a dangerous job; many clowns have died or sustained serious injuries. One clown told a reporter that ‘over his 23 years of clowning around, he has suffered from over 24 broken bones, three concussions, a dislocated jaw, internal injuries, and a torn-off ear’ (Von Kral, 2016). Although clowns have been an integral part of rodeo for over a century, the first recorded female rodeo clown, Dixie Reger Mosley, did not enter the arena until the 1940s (Fowler, 2022). Even at 91, Mosley still speaks to the press about her clowning days and attends rodeo clown reunions in Fort Worth, Texas ‘where she has been the only female rodeo clown’ in attendance (Fowler, 2022). Documentation about other female clowns was scarce although, in 1980, Robin Sindorf, a former Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader, made headlines when she took on the role. In a United Press

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International article, Chris Crystal states that Sindorf ‘adds satin, femininity to rodeo barrel clowning’ and that she is playful, waving her ‘white bra at the bull, which gets a laugh from the crowd’ (1980, para. 3). Unlike the Rodeo Queen, the Rodeo Clown needs to be tough, funny, loud, and fearless. Margaret Irving (2012) provides a definition which represents the practice of clowning that can be seen in the rodeo arena, and beyond: Clowning is the display of unrestrained, unsocialised and foolish behaviour whereby a person performs in such a way as to be considered freakish, mad, mischievous, anarchic, simple or silly. Clowning involves lowering one’s comparable status and appearing foolish for the pleasure of an audience. From this position the performer can parody, mock and mimic others, often commenting upon and subverting social norms. (p. 14)

The practice of clowning goes against the feminine expectations of beauty and social standards placed on the queen in the arena. If the queen’s role is to uphold the patriarchal norms of the rodeo and act as a symbol of femininity, then the clown’s role is to subvert these expectations. This might explain, in part, why so few women take up the role of rodeo clown: it seems to be a defiant one. The clown, as a symbol, has the power to renegotiate femininity through ‘the subversive potential of humour’ and the ways in which ‘humour is inextricably tied up with possessing power’ (Kelly, 2017, p. 46). While the role of the cowboy is to dress as though he were on the farm—and ‘perform’ his masculinity by riding, roping, and steering—by contrast, the clown, ‘dressed in make-up and a clown costume’ performs as though they were in a circus, their ‘foolishness, the opposite of the cowboy’s serious work’ (Stoeltje, 1985, p. 160). As I was learning about the Rodeo Clown, I became fascinated not just by their relationship to the cowboys (i.e. as saviours) but also their relationship to the crowd and the audience. In my poem, The Female Rodeo Clown, I tried to capture the layered-ness of this role: The Female Rodeo Clown must protect the rider, beguile the bull, lure it from every injured man, when the crowd needs distracting from blood and bone, she must crack jokes, start singalongs, tear off her own clothes. When the bull returns, she must be savvy, map its movements: spinning, sunfishing, breaking in two. When the rider jumps to save himself she’ll whip off her bra to wave in the air: yoo hoo, come and get me! The bull can never resist, so as the cowboy shuffles to safety, the clown leaps in her body-sized barrel,

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braces herself for the beast to kick. She prays horns cannot pierce sheet metal, hopes her greasepaint isn’t running in the heat. The first stanza opens with an exploration of the two most important components of this job: protecting the cowboy and entertaining the crowd. There is no space here between the ‘blood and bone’ and the need to ‘crack jokes’, indicating how often the clown must switch between the two. The slant rhymes (i.e., ‘bone’ and ‘clothes’) also speak to the vulnerabilities inherent in the role—how clothes and flesh protect the clown but how they may be stripped, figuratively and literally, in the arena. The second stanza considers the interplay between the clown and cowboy, the clown and bull, and the clown and crowd. Here the cowboy who—in the hierarchy of the rodeo (and patriarchal systems), would have power over the female clown—is saving himself, thanks to the clown. She is sacrificing herself for him by luring a dangerous animal close to her. She does this through her knowledge of the bull’s movements (i.e., ‘spinning, sunfishing, breaking/in two’) but also by sexualising herself—taking off her bra and offering a cartoon-like call: yoohoo, come and get me! Of course, the crowd will be watching this and know what she is doing: what man or animal could resist this display? Unlike the queen, who is expected to remain poised and feminine and virginal (i.e. young and unmarried), the clown, by her nature, can subvert norms and expectations, engaging in foolish and/or sexual behaviour (Crystal, 1980). In stanza three we see the bull cannot resist her. When the bull starts moving towards the clown, she jumps to safety in her barrel, praying she won’t be kicked. And still, at the very end of the poem, she is worried not just about her safety, but also about her looks: ‘hopes/her greasepaint isn’t running in the heat’. Even in this space of subversion and performance, the female rodeo clown still feels the weight of expectation, the need to perform femininity. Vikki Krane (2001) states that ‘society scrutinizes and marginalizes individuals who engage in cross-gender role behaviors’ and that ‘females in sport know the social expectations of appearing feminine and the repercussions of not appearing feminine’ (pp. 117–121). Even though the clown—in her makeup and baggy clothes and humorous character—is engaging in non-feminine behaviours, the woman behind the makeup is still living in a patriarchal society and understands what is required of her. Even bracing in her barrel from the bull, she cannot escape these expectations. Although poetry is not generalisable in a statistical way, it can help to ‘stimulate empathy in readers’ (Gallardo et al., 2009, p. 291). Readers are able to ‘locate themselves in the poem, and when there is a difference, they are able to transcend the poem and create that which is their own’ (Gallardo et al., 2009, p. 291). I hope this poem has led each reader into the arena with the bull and given them an opportunity to consider the fear and the pressure, as well as the performance and masquerade, that rodeo clowning entails.

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Leaving the Arena—Looking Ahead Poetry lets us ‘come in through the backdoor with the feeling, the emotion, the experience’ but as soon as you begin ‘reflecting on that experience you can come back to the theory’ (Faulkner, 2018, p. 5). By using these two poems as a way to synthesise my research into the roles of rodeo queens and clowns, and also by providing the historical context and theories which shed light on their production, I hope I have closed the circle: linking emotion back to critical inquiry. Poetry also allows the readers to ‘come away with the resonance of another’s world’ and that we, as researchers and scholars, should focus our efforts on ‘showing and imagining’ rather than ‘telling’ and reporting (Neilsen, 2008, pp. 96–99). Writing these poems gave me an opportunity to feel what it might be like to inhabit these roles and I hope readers have also come away with a new understanding of rodeo queens and clowns, the expectations that are tied to them, and the world of American rodeo. Cowgirls, it seems, always receive more attention than the rodeo queens, particularly within contexts related to modern feminist history (Laegreid, 2006, p. 206). Rodeo queens have been, and continue to be, perceived as static, unable to move from or beyond traditional or domestic roles (Laegreid, 2006, p. 206). This may have led to the lack of academic work, media coverage, and folklore related to the Rodeo Queen. Women rodeo clowns have also not received the attention they deserve. With this in mind, I hope that these poems will add to the canon of literature related to these roles and further the conversation about what it really means to be a woman in the rodeo arena. Finally, poetic inquiry should ‘transform by providing new insight, giving perspective, and/or advocating for social change’ (Faulkner, 2019a, p. 227). Ultimately, for me, the aim is that these poems will sit alongside historical, archival and academic documents; newspaper reports, interviews, and exhibition notes; as well as photographs, poems, songs, and folklore, as a means of questioning, complicating, and enriching the narratives told about women in rodeo generally and, more specifically, those told about the queens and clowns.

References About the PRCA. (2021). Retrieved 21 March 2021, from https://www.prorodeo.com/prorodeo/ rodeo/about-the-prca Bartky, S. L. (1990). Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. Routledge. Budd, J. (2022). White space as metaphoric frame. Poets’ Quarterly. http://www.poetsquarterly. com/2015/08/white-space-as-metaphoric-frame.html Burbick, J. (2007). Rodeo queens: On the circuit with America’s cowgirls. Public Affairs. Crystal, C. (1980). She adds satin, femininity to rodeo barrel clowning. UPI. https://www.upi.com/ Archives/1980/10/12/She-adds-satin-femininity-to-rodeo-barrel-clowning/5772340171200/ Curtis, M. (2020). Enchanted by the rodeo queen. Harlequin Heartwarming. DeShazer, M. K. (1986). Inspiring women: Reimagining the muse. Perganon.

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Faulkner, S. (2018). Crank up the feminism: Poetic inquiry as feminist methodology. Humanities (Basel), 7(3), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.3390/h7030085 Faulkner, S. (2019a). Poetic inquiry: Craft, method and practice (2nd ed.). Routledge. Faulkner, S. (2019b). Poetic inquiry: Poetry as/in/for social research. In P. Leavy (Ed.), Handbook of arts-based research (2nd ed., pp. 208–232). The Guilford Press. Ford, E. (2020). Rodeo as refuge, rodeo as rebellion: Gender, race, and identity in the American rodeo. University Press of Kansas. Forsyth, C. J., & Thompson, C. Y. (2007). Helpmates of the Rodeo. Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 31(4), 394–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193723507307812 Fowler, M. (2022). The first female rodeo clown—Brick & Elm. Brick & Elm. https://brickandelm. com/the-first-female-rodeo-clown/ Gallardo, H. L., Furman, R., & Kulkarni, S. (2009). Explorations of depression: Poetry and narrative in autoethnographic qualitative research. Qualitative Social Work, 8(3), 287304. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1473325009337837 Gilbert, M., & Gillet, J. (2011). Equine athletes and interspecies sport. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 47(5), 632–643. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690211416726 Graveland, B. (2011, July). Rodeo one of the most dangerous sports in the world, study finds. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/rodeo-one-of-the-most-dan gerous-sports-in-the-world-study-finds/article586921 Irving, M. (2012). Toward a female clown practice: transgression, archetype and myth. PEARL. Plymouth Electronic Archive & Research Library. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk//handle/10026. 1/1583 James, D., & Smith, M. (2021). Thom. Wild Mustang Security Firm: Vellum. JHREA. (2019). The economy of rodeo | Western Ranches. Western Ranches. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://westernranches.com/rodeo-economy Kelly, H. (2017). The potential of the clown to renegotiate notions of femininity in contemporary performance: Ester Van Der Walt’s transparent. South African Theatre Journal, 30(1–3), 46–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/10137548.2017.1358103 Kline, T. J. (2013). Rodeo queen. Avon romance: Harper Collins Imprint. Krane, V. (2001). We can be athletic and feminine, but do we want to? Challenging hegemonic femininity in women’s sport. Quest (national Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education), 53(1), 115–133. https://doi.org/10.1080/00336297.2001.10491733 Laegreid, R. (2006). Riding pretty: Rodeo royalty in the American West. University of Nebraska Press. Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford Press. Lecompte, M. L. (1989). Cowgirls at the crossroads: Women in professional Rodeo, 1885–1922. Canadian Journal of History of Sport, 20(2), 27–49. https://ur.art1lib.com/book/62078802/ b35164 Liming, D. (2012). You’re a what? Rodeo Clown. Occupational Outlook Quarterly, 56(3), 34–40. Manawarodeo.org. (2022). Rodeo queen requirements. http://manawarodeo.org/wp-content/upl oads/2018/05/1-RODEO-QUEEN-REQUIREMENTS.pdf. Missrodeousa.com. (2022). Miss Rodeo USA: Miss Rodeo USA National pageant rules and regulations. http://www.missrodeousa.com/uploads/4/9/1/5/49157581/2020_mrusa_page ant_rules_and_regulations.pdf. Neilsen, L. (2008). Lyric inquiry. In K. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples and issues (pp. 93–102). Sage. Oliver, A. (1994). Rodeo cowgirls: An ambivalent arena [Master’s thesis, Oregon State University]. Patton, T., & Schedlock, S. (2012). Gender, whiteness, and power in rodeo breaking away from the ties of sexism and racism. Lexington Books. Pimentel, S. (2017). On borders, white space, and saying the unsayable. https://lithub.com/on-bor ders-white-space-and-saying-the-unsayable/

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Poindexter, C. C. (1998). Poetry as data analysis: Honoring the words of research participants. Reflections (Long Beach, CA), 4(3), 22–25. https://reflectionsnarrativesofprofessionalh elping.org/index.php/Reflections/article/view/563 Prendergast, M. (2009). “Poem is what?” Poetic inquiry in qualitative social science research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences. Sense. Radcliffe, T. (2020). Finding the road home. Love inspired: Hearts of Oklahoma. Reed, T. V. (2013). The poetic is political: Feminist poetry and the poetics of women’s rights. In C. R. McCann, & S.-K. Kim (Eds). Feminist theory reader, local and global perspectives (pp. 85–97). Routledge. Ribeiro, A. C. (2009). Toward a philosophy of poetry. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 33(61–77), 69–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4975.2009.00185.x Richardson, L. (1993). Poetics, dramatics, and transgressive validity: The case of the skipped line. The Sociological Quarterly, 34(4), 695–710. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.1993. tb00113.x Rock, L. (2021). Ride like a girl: A narrative exploration of women in the rodeo [Doctoral dissertation, Oklahoma State University]. https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/335731/Rock_ okstate_0664D_17487.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Rodeo Ambassadors—Promoting and preserving America’s sport. (2022a). Judging the rodeo queen pageant. http://www.rodeoroyalty.com/judges.html Rodeo ambassadors—Promoting and preserving America’s sport. (2022b). Queen’s run. http:// www.rodeoroyalty.com/queens-run.html#:~:text=The%20Queen’s%20Run,own%20horses% 20at%20rodeo%20performances Russel, D. (1970). Wild west: A history of the wild west shows. University of Texas Press. Savage, C. (1996). Cowgirls. Bloomsbury. Schweizer, C. (2021, December 30). Ups and downs: It’s been a wild and crazy couple of years for rodeo queens. Columbia Basin Herald. https://columbiabasinherald.com/news/2021/dec/30/ ups-and-downs-its-been-wild-and-crazy-couple-years/ Shields, V. R., & Coughlin, C. (2000). Performing rodeo queen culture: Competition, athleticism and excessive feminine masquerade. Text and Performance Quarterly, 20(2), 182–202. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10462930009366293 Simecek, K. (2019). Cultivating intimacy: The use of the second person in lyric poetry. Philosophy and Literature, 43(2), 501–518. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2019.0017 Stampone, C. (2018). “Obliged to yield”: The language of patriarchy and the system of mental slavery in Mansfield Park. Studies in the Novel, 50(2), 197–212. https://doi.org/10.1353/sdn. 2018.0011 Stoeltje, B. J. (1985). The rodeo clown and the semiotics of metaphor. Journal of Folklore Research, 22(2/3), 155–177. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3814390 Sultana, A. (2012). Patriarchy and women’s subordination: A theoretical analysis. Arts Faculty Journal, 4, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.3329/afj.v4i0.12929 Thatcher, C. (2022). Cowgirl poetics: Writing women in rodeo. TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, 26(Special Issue 67), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.37816 Tice, K. W. (2012). Queens of academe: Beauty pageantry, student bodies, and college life. Oxford University Press. Vincent, A. (2018). Is there a definition? Ruminating on poetic inquiry, strawberries and the continued growth of the field. Art/research International, 3(2), 48–76. https://doi.org/10.18432/ ari29356 Von Kral, K. (2016). The hidden horror of being a rodeo clown. Cowboy Lifestyle Network. https:// cowboylifestylenetwork.com/22914-2/ Wells, A. (2013). A feminist perspective on American rodeo. Bitch Media. https://www.bitchmedia. org/post/women-of-the-wild-west-shows-and-the-american-rodeo.

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Weninger, D., & Dallaire, C. (2019). The gendered barrel racer–horse relationship in Western Canadian rodeo. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 54(1), 104–124. https://doi. org/10.1177/1012690217708578 Young, D. (2010). The art of recklessness: Poetry as assertive force and contradiction. Graywolf Press.

Dr Christina Thatcher is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She has published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Her third collection-in-progress, Breaking a Mare, won a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary in 2018. This work aims to explore the intersections between female strength and vulnerability in the context of farm work, horse rearing, and rodeo riding. Follow her @writetoempower

Gesturing Towards Decolonial Openings: Sports and Poetry Sepandarmaz Mashreghi

Abstract In the following chapter I aim to engage with sports and creative writing, namely poetry, from a decolonial standpoint. This chapter is the result of my doctoral research, in which I collaborated with ten Afghan youth living in Sweden, within a participatory art-based research paradigm, in order to explore and reveal their engagement with sports. The intention here is to delink sport from Eurocentric thought and the competitive sports cultures of the West (Carrington in Handbook of the Sociology of Sport. Routledge, 105–115, 2015); and instead work to recover otherwise forms of engagement with sports that work to bring about re-existence (Walsh in International Journal of Lifelong Education 34(1):9–21) of lives and ways of knowing that have been historically negated by such Eurocentrism. I have supplemented the chapter with poetry and prose (some written by me) not only to contextualise the themes and illuminate certain personal experiences that have influenced my scholarship, but also to provide the readers with a cartography of the epistemic stand I depart from. Keywords Afghanistan · Art-based research · Participatory research · Refugee youth · Sweden

Introduction Hearken to the reed (flute) as it laments and tells stories of separation: “Since from the land they uprooted me my song has expressed humanity’s agony. But any who has been forced away from their home seeks to connect and find that home once more” Jalaladin Mohammad Balkhi, (known as Rumi), S. Mashreghi (B) Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_10

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The Masnavi, Book One (author translation, 2022). This chapter is the result of my doctoral research, in which I collaborated with ten Afghan youth living in Sweden within a participatory art-based research paradigm. One of the aims of the larger study was to present the experiences of the youth with sports and physical activity as it was researched and analysed by the youth. One of the reasons I chose to investigate sport and physical activity was the dominance of discussions and policies related to integration in/through sport within the context of migrants and asylum seekers in Europe. When I started my doctoral studies in 2016, right after what came to be known as the long summer of migration (Jovivic, 2021), there was a growing political focus on involving sports clubs in setting up programmes directed at various types of migrants in order to foster public health and social integration (Agergaard, 2018). In most of these discussions and policies, integration was understood as a one-way process that overlooked the embodied experiences of (forced) migrants and their histories (De Martini Ugolotti & Caudwell, 2022; Mashreghi, 2020). Moreover, migrants coming from non-Western regions were positioned as inherently different to their European counterparts; and therefore, in particular need of such integration programmes (Mashreghi, 2022a; Ratna & Samie, 2018). Lastly, sport was often seen as a uniform instrument that was defined within a (very limited) Eurocentric framework (Agergaard, 2018; De Martini Ugolotti & Caudwell, 2022). The focus of these integrative policies and this definition of sport does not sit well with me. As a woman of colour who is a migrant to both Canada and Scandinavia, I have observed the ways Eurocentric discourses around integration and sports, within the media, the political sphere, and the academy, constantly question, dissect, investigate, and translate (and legislate) my body, my history, and my culture (Smith, 2012; Young, 2003). I find that not only have such discussions (re)produced problematic stereotypes about me and people like me, but they have also provided surface level analysis that (for the most part) fails to critically interrogate the inequitable, able-bodied, gendered, and Eurocentric field of sport (Ratna & Samie, 2018). Such discussions often understand sports in unilinear terms which underline that all rational sports originated from Europe (Kummels, 2013). In this way: Europe is seen as the unique incubator of all forms of meaningful physical activity that can be properly understood as sport, and sport is defined in such a way so as to preclude other forms of physical culture from being sport. (Carrington, 2015, p. 111)

This narrative goes back to the invention of modern sports in the mid-nineteenth century which came about as a result of codification and regulation of various physical activities in Europe (Besnier et al., 2018). This particular understanding of sport was meant to be further proof of Europeans as rational, civilised, Christian, white men in opposition to the ‘savage’, uncivilised, unchristian other (Besnier et al., 2018). In the context of integration, therefore, sport has become a civilising and modernising

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agent that is deemed necessary for the uncivilised and underdeveloped (Darnell & Hayhurst, 2011; Spaaij et al., 2018). In line with Willem Schinkel (2018), I believe that often underlining the integration policies, is the legacy of race-related work and cultural/ethnic classification of early modern/colonial era that continuously positions and assesses ‘modern/civilised’ individuals, presented as the host society at large, against ‘underdeveloped/uncivilised’ migrants.

Modernity/Coloniality Modernity is not only a historical linear process but rather an epistemic frame through which the world’s history has come to be understood (Mignolo, 2009; Stein et al., 2020). What developed as modernity began with the colonisation of the so-called Americas through which European, self-serving, narratives of progress were advanced. These narratives are based on a dualistic and hierarchical logic that posits subject against object, reason against emotion and humans against each other and nature (Maldonado-Torres, 2007; Quijano, 2007). In this sense, modernity/ coloniality denotes the long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of the European colonial project (Quijano, 2007). These patterns define culture, labour, our intersubjective relationships, and our modes of knowledge production (MaldonadoTorres, 2007). ‘In a way, as modern subjects, we breathe coloniality all the time and every day’ (Maldonado-Torres, 2007, p. 243). As such modernity is inseparable from coloniality and it is present in our everyday modern living. Doing decolonial work, therefore necessitates rejecting the universalism of western thought and delinking from its normative models of thinking, making, and interpreting the world (Mignolo, 2009; Tlostanova et al., 2019). To interrogate the colonial rearticulations of integration in/through sport in my work, it was necessary to delink from the discourse of integration and instead work to bridge the academic research with the lived experiences of the youth in ways that would bring to the fore the complexities and nuances present in their everyday lives. In this way, I aimed to work to ‘refuse the narrative enclosures that flatten people seeking asylum into essentialising binaries’ (De Martini Ugolotti & Caudwell, 2022, p. 4). In choosing to collaborate with the youth and (as Zapatistas say) ‘ask while walking with them’ (Holloway, 2011), I also moved beyond the boundaries of single discipline (of sports) and instead employed several perspectives from various epistemic loci. By working creatively with art and poetry from a decolonial standpoint, I aimed to engage in a trans-disciplinary approach that not only rejects the bordering and separation of individual disciplines, but also works to recover hidden histories and alternative forms of physical culture. Such scholarship then can gesture towards decolonial thinking and foster knowing otherwise.

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Knowing Otherwise The white father told us: I think, therefore I am. The black mother within each of us … whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore, I can be free Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (2007, p. 36).

Decolonial and feminist scholarship teaches us that knowledge and knowing are not universal, rather they are geographically, historically, and politically situated (Mignolo, 2009, 2018). Knowing otherwise starts by interrogating the universalism of sight/thought central to Enlightenment subjectivity and instead foregrounds ways of knowing and being that have been negated by such universalism. Knowing, thinking, and writing are grounded not on abstractions but on corporeal realities and lived experiences (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015). The body, in its gendered, racialised, classed, historicised, and geographical orientation is the ground of thought (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015; Mignolo, 2009). Knowing otherwise acknowledges and privileges these corporeal, lived and sensory experiences (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2015; Salinas, 2020). Otherwise then is, ‘… ways of being, thinking, sensing, feeling, doing and living in relations that challenge the hegemony and universality of capitalism, Eurocentred modernity and the Western civilizatory logic’ (Walsh, 2015, p. 12). The generation of knowledge and theory through corporeal and embodied experiences of people whose ways of knowing and being have been historically negated by coloniality of knowledge is knowing otherwise (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). Knowing otherwise starts from a different genealogy and a different location. It exists in the borders and cracks of the modern/colonial world, and it continues to be made and remade against and in spite of the totalitarianism of modern/colonial world order (Mignolo & Tlostanova, 2006; Walsh, 2015). To contextualise this space for the readers in this chapter, poetry is interspersed with the academic considerations, literature, and research to demonstrate some of the themes that developed from the arts-based practise of poetry writing and interrogate my own reflections as someone central to the research myself. In addition, this methodology challenges the presentation of art as research findings in the academy. The method of weaving poetry with academic literature speaks directly to knowing otherwise, to a different epistemology and genealogy that, as I will explain later in the chapter, plays an important part in forming my understanding of the world and my relationship with this research and its co-participants. I have chosen verses from Balkhi,1 Kazemi,2 Shafiei Kadkani,3 Lorde, and Anzaldúa; but I have also chosen verses from a poem that I, myself, created when reflecting on the process of this 1

Molana Jalaloddin Mohammad Balkhi (1207–1273 CE), or as he is known in the Western world Rumi, was born in the province of Balkh in the Khorasan region (Currently in Afghanistan). He was an influential philosopher who argued that only great love can create an ideal world. 2 Mohammad KazemKazemi (1968–) is an influential Afghan literary scholar and poet. He was born in Herat, Afghanistan but in 1984 after the start of the civil war in Afghanistan and the invasion of the Soviet army, he immigrated to Iran as a refugee. 3 Mohammad-Reza Shafiei Kadkani (1939) is an Iranian writer, poet and literary critic. He was born in Nishapur, Khorasan. He is currently a professor of literature in Tehran University.

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collaborative research. This poem was meant to be an otherwise form of disseminating the knowledge generated in this project (see Mashreghi, 2022b). In this way, I have chosen to follow the epistemology of the borderlands from which I, and the co-participants, come from.

Into the Margins and the Borderlands: The Youth and I You were on my side of the border, your wrong side, reciting my-your poetry. and I was astonished: they had told me you don’t belong ‘here’. Why then, I wondered, you speak my mother tongue so eloquently? I did not know then that my grandmothers were your grandmothers that ‘here’ and ‘there’ was a 150-year-old invention that my mother tongue, my stories have been intertwined with yoursfor time immemorial. (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 3). To take an epistemic shift to the borders and write from the modernity/coloniality’s other, margins and cracks, that is from the lived experiences and epistemic stand of my research collaborators—the youth, I needed to start from a different genealogy. To do this, I had to return to the beginnings, both mine and the youths. I am from Khorasan, the easternmost province of what is currently called Islamic republic of Iran. Khorasan is a historical and expansive region in central Asia that encompasses parts of the current nation-states of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and easternmost province of Iran (Crews, 2015; MojtahedZadeh, 2004). The name Khorasan translates to the land of sun which is a reference to its geographical location in the east of the ancient Iranian federative system (Mojtahed-Zadeh, 2004). Interestingly, my last name, Mashreghi, means from the eastern lands and, according to family legend, was chosen to affirm and declare our Khorasani heritage. This historical region was partitioned in the mid-nineteen century and parts of it were colonised by Russia and other regions were included in the new country of Afghanistan (Crews, 2015; Mojtahed-Zadeh, 2004). Reform policies enacted by these different governments varied significantly, giving rise to different societal, cultural, and political fabrics across the newly formed borders (Adelkhah & Olszewska, 2007; Shams, 2021). These differences also influenced the circumstances of each country in relation to the political events that took place in the last decades of the twentieth century. In late 1970s and early 1980s, the countries of Iran and Afghanistan underwent significant political changes. In Iran, a revolution took place that established the current Islamic republic regime. This revolution was followed by a US-backed Iraqi army invasion at its western borders (Young, 2003),

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which started an eight-year war. The new regime, however, persisted, finished the war with its borders remaining intact and have, despite its precarious relationship with the US, experienced relative stability since. On the other hand, in Afghanistan, a Soviet-backed coup installed a Marxist government which resulted in a civil war and the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet army (Adelkhah & Olszewska, 2007; Crews, 2015). Unfortunately, Afghanistan as a country has been struggling since from internal violence and instability, which has involved various local and international powers (Adelkhah & Olszewska, 2007; Crews, 2015). Khorasan, therefore, becomes a place of enunciation for both the Afghan youth and I, and plays an important part in shaping our ways of knowing, being, and living. Alas… Borders are solid they divide, separate invent difference. so, you are ‘my people’ and you are not, your herstories are ‘my herstories’ and they are not. (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 3). The ten youth co-participating in this study are from Afghanistan, yet most of them, aside from two, migrated to Iran with their families as children. Their migration stories have continued with their arrival in Sweden as unaccompanied minors seeking asylum. Despite the fact that we share Khorasan as our ancestral homeland, there are also stark differences in our lived experiences that continue to shape our thinking-doing. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the bordering and partitioning of Khorasan was taking place, my ancestors, who had direct links to places and people in Afghanistan, were living on the Iranian side of the borders. This accidental event granted an Iranian citizenship to my great-grandparents and allowed them to prosper within the relatively stable conditions of the nation-state in the early 1900s. As a result, I was born and raised in a middle-class family and have benefited from its privileges ever since. The youth who collaborated with me, on the other hand, have led precarious lives resulting from the displacement of their families due to the many different civil wars that have taken place in Afghanistan. As discussed before, the youth and I have experienced political turmoil, war, and displacement. Yet, due to the aforementioned differences in reform policies enacted earlier in the century and also the difference in the nature of wars that took place in the two countries of Iran and Afghanistan, the violence and trauma that we experienced were also different. I spent my childhood in Khorasan, in the east, far from the western borders affected by Iran-Iraq war, and even though war (and its violence) was part of my everyday life for eight years, I did not (for the most part) suffer from its overtly violent effects, such as bombing or displacement. On the other hand, all my collaborators, save one, were born in displacement. This has meant that they have been continuously denied legal status, access to education and health care, or the right to a home. Living in Khorasan, I also came into contact with many displaced people from Afghanistan who were fleeing the war and violence. However, my earliest memory of

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the displaced people of Afghanistan is their negative depictions in the Iranian media, and public discourse, as criminals and rapists. I came to a different understanding though when I was, quite randomly, exposed to a counter-narrative while on a family road-trip. At sunset in the hot breath of the road I shall leave I came on foot, and on foot I shall leave The talisman of my exile will be broken tonight And the tablecloth, which was always empty, will be folded tonight. And on the eves of feast days, neighbour! No more will you hear the sound of weeping, neighbour! The stranger who had not a penny shall leave And the child that had no dolls, too shall leave Mohammad Kazem Kazemi, Piadeh amadeh boodam, piadeh khaham raft, (Author translation, 2022) I remember surfing the radio’s FM channels in the car when I landed on a radio station from Afghanistan. We found out later that the name of that night’s program was Night Stories and that night’s story was the medieval romantic poem of Khosrow and Shirin, written by Nezami in the 1100s. This work is considered as one of the most valuable works in Persian literature (Khosrow & Shirin, 2021). Hearing the voice actors reciting this famous literary work in their Dari dialect surprised me. Before that night, I had not thought of people from Afghanistan as people who have history or culture, let alone as people whom I share this culture and history with. Those voice actors not only taught me one of the most famous literary works of my history, but they also made me face the bigotry present in the Iranian public discourse. I started to question those hegemonic images and engage with the people of Afghanistan in different ways. As I continued my questioning of problematic narratives, I was made aware that these problematic narratives are reproduced even within Iranian milieus who advocate for solidarity with the people of Afghanistan. I realised that the basis of solidarity discourse for many Iranians, including myself, has been the idea that people from Afghanistan are in reality ‘Iranian’ and therefore worthy of care. This view negates self-determination and sovereignty of the people of Afghanistan who deserve justice as humans (Hakimi, 2020). The thought that I may have been complicit in the reproduction of injustice troubled me deeply and made me further question my own assumptions and intentions. This lack of clarity forced me to reorient the ways I planned to do research with the youth. I had to make a shift to ask while walking with them, and separately, in this unclear path. I need to understand you are your own person; that you have your own stories, herstories, that 150 years of border divides us still. so, I ask you… (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 4).

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The Epistemology of Khorasan Decolonial works requires a departure from the borders and margins of the modern/ colonial world so as to give sustenance and force to the otherwise (Walsh, 2015). In this way, those living in the borders can ‘reclaim and tell their stories in their own ways and give testimonio to their collective herstories and struggles’ (Smith, 2005, p. 89). Within these stories are those otherwise knowing, being, thinking, imagining, and yearning that drive resistance and reaffirm life for the borderlanders (Mashreghi, 2021; Smith, 2005). As such, an existence that is not in relation of dependency to modernity/coloniality is advanced (Fanon, 2008; Mignolo, 2009). To do this work, the youth and I attempted to reclaim art and poetry, through the epistemology of Khorasan, to tell their stories. How far away does take me the designs of these tiles? –So far that cannot be contained in speech, nor in the eyes, It is the blue of Nishapur and Herat’s skies that is captured in these small designs… Mohammadreza Shafiei Kadkani, Hezaerye dovvome ahooye koohi (Author translation, 2022) While I have argued for and established art and poetry as a Khorasani way of knowingbeing elsewhere (see Mashreghi, 2021), here I assert that poetry, and art, in the region is a form of knowing-being, so hegemonic that it can be seen in all layers of social life (Manoukian, 2004). Poetry is in everyday life; it is heard in the children’s play; it is written on the random walls and back of the trucks and taxis; it is rehearsed, as a community pastime, by non-literate people in the rural regions; it used by parents to partake knowledge and teach social values to their children, and it is used by scholars and social commentators. Poetry is also rehearsed loudly in various games such as dodgeball, kabaddi, and many other local games. Throughout history, multitudes of Khorasani scholars have engaged with art and poetry to generate knowledge in various fields of philosophy, medicine, astronomy, linguistics, feminism, identity, and public discourse (see Mashreghi, 2022b). Using art and poetry, therefore, has served to regain a lost dignity and established a counter-narrative to the hegemonic ideology. Furthermore, it has allowed for a (collaborative) scholarship that bears witness to the (re)existence of muted subjectivities. Before ‘here’ we have had her stories Before ‘here’ our bodies have known many stories (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 4).

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‘Asking While Walking’: The Context of the Participatory Art-Based Research The youth taking part in this collaborative work were part of a larger group of minor asylum seekers who arrived in Sweden without parents or legal guardians in the years 2014–2016 (CRC, 2005). They had been living in Sweden for two to four years. In order to work with them, I had to acquire permission of the Swedish ethics board, which I received in 2018 (reference number: 2018/263). A total of ten youth between the ages of 17 and 20, which consisted of one female and nine males, volunteered to participate and agreed to share their stories and analysis with the larger public. The histories of the youth converged in some aespects and diverged in others. Eight of the youth had lived in Iran since birth or early childhood before migrating to Sweden. These young people had informal access to education and certain sport facilities while growing up in Iran. One of the other male co-researchers had migrated directly from Afghanistan and therefore, he was formally educated and had formal experience with certain sports through physical education classes. The one young woman in the study only discussed her experiences of physical activity in Sweden. As established already, we used art as a mechanism to begin our collaborative work. The youth generated artefacts (posters) that explored their stories of physical activity and sports. We then, collectively, thematically analysed the artefacts after which several themes were established and discussed. At the end, during two participatory exhibitions that featured the artefacts and the themes, the generated knowledge was disseminated. These exhibitions took place in the youth’s school and Malmö University. First exhibition was open to the staff and students at the school and the second exhibition was open to public. During these two exhibitions, the youth’s artefacts were on display along with the themes that were generated during the participatory analysis. During the exhibitions, the youth interacted with the audience actively, and discussed the research findings and the collaborative process (see Mashreghi, 2021, 2022a). Our heads like to think, to reflect, to know. Our heads know that we are able, agents, in control. We are Yasamin(s), Mohammad(s), Hasan(s), Ali(s) [Afghan kids], and these are the stories of our physical activities (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 6).

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Reclaiming the Borderlands In the Borderlands You are the battleground… You are at home, a stranger… To Survive the Borderlands You must live sin fronteras Be a crossroads. Gloria Anzaldúa, To Live in the borderlands Means You (2012, pp. 194–195). Grounding our collaborative research journey in our shared Khorasani epistemology allowed us to delink youth’s experiences of physical activity and sports from modern/colonial framings. Thinking through art and poetry afforded us opportunities to pay attention to the ways that the youth think through their praxis, in relation to physical activity and sports. It also advanced decolonial work by opening the space to ‘recover hidden histories of alternative forms of physical culture […] that generate different meaning to those of the dominant competitive sports cultures of the West’ (Carrington, 2015, p. 111). The youth demonstrated that through their active, conscious, and continuous praxis, they reinterpreted their experiences of sports to recreate conditions of dignity and belonging despite and against the ever-present violence of everyday bordering and migration regimes. Our small hands have worked hard, laying brick on top of brick picking strawberries under the hot sun. They have sewn your sweaters. Our small hands have, lovingly, excitedly built football fields out of nothing for our evening football meets. (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 5). This constant redefining and re-signifying life in conditions of dignity, that happens despite and against violence and trauma, is what Adolo Albán Achinte called ‘re-existence’ (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018). As such, re-existence is not a reactionary response, rather it is a regenerative praxis that affirms life in face of the violence inherent in modernity/coloniality. As argued before, modern/colonial system, as a world order, has established an epistemological, racial, heterosexual, and patriarchal supremacy that separates and borders humanity into hierarchical classifications. As such coloniality, as a system, did not end when colonialism ended, but it has continued to extend its control over, not only material resources but also, bodies, minds, and imagination (Arashiro et al., 2015; Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2007). The bordering then is not only geographical, but also epistemological and works to mark

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the civilised and uncivilised, developed and undeveloped, modern and traditional, rational and emotional (Anzaldúa, 2012; Mashreghi, 2021). The establishment of these unnatural divides is violent and painful, yet this emotional residue gives rise to a borderland; a third space that is neither there nor here (Anzaldúa, 2012), an unfixed, ambiguous place where the otherwise dwells. The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta [open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it haemorrhages again, the lifeblood of the two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (2012, p. 3) The inhabitants of the borderlands are the transgressors who are in constant state of crossing under the ever-present violence of the borders. They experience pain and intersecting oppressions (Motta, 2015). They have to be vigilant and oversensitive and thus ‘excruciatingly alive to the world’ (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 60). They develop a tolerance for ambiguity and contradictions; a form of existing that, in order to live, must unite rather than separate, crossing boundaries continuously. This form of consciousness is not merely an assemblage of separate pieces, rather it is synthesising and ‘in continual creative motion’ (Anzaldúa, 2012, p. 102). This existence develops deep within the darkness of pain and trauma, as the inhabitants of the borderlands learn to ‘bear the intimacy of scrutiny and flourish with in’ (Lorde, 2007, p. 36). And thus, the darkness of the borderlands is turned to places of possibilities. These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong thought that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds and incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. […] place of power within each of us is neither while nr surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (2007, p. 36)

The youth researchers’ stories of living simultaneously with trauma and joy was a testimony to their (re)creative and conscious journeying within the borderlands. Their stories of sport and physical activity demonstrated that they continuously and consciously transformed their experiences of everyday bordering into a voice of hope and becoming. As such sports and physical activity space became a site of intensity, ‘where the gradual wounding produced by the asylum regime is both manifested and negotiated’ (De Martini Ugolotti, 2020, p. 14). And our legs… Our legs have walked distances, across the fields, mountains, cities, countries, continents.

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Our legs are still walking… They are alive with energy! Sometimes they don’t sleep at night… trapped in the dark memories of our ‫[ راه پیمایی‬Cross-countries walking]; restless in the anticipation of kicking the ball across the field. (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 5). Through this emotional journeying, the youth lived and felt sports and physical activities in ways that exceeded dominant understandings of sport culture of the West. Instead for the youth, their experiences of sports and physical activity was less fragmented and unequivocally linked to their hopes and dreams of future (see also Bergstrom-Wuolo et al., 2018; Khan, 2013; Stack & Iwasaki, 2009). Our heads know that our bodies are always moving, falling rising falling rising learning to bike in the streets of Sweden. (Mashreghi, 2022b, p. 6). In this way sport was transformed into a space where pain, trauma, joy, hope, and laughter rubbed against each other. This constant return to life, against and in spite of the violence the youth experience every day, shifts beyond a mere resistance to the conditions of their lives but rather it brings about a re-existence as dignified humans, and as such advances a decolonial otherwise. Our hearts have shrunk in fear of the border security, of the darkness of the smuggler’s trunk, of the abyss of the blue seas. Our hearts have yet to give up when filling up with air swimming in the endless waters; when beating hard watching Cristiano Ronaldo move towards the goal. (Mashreghi, 2022b, pp. 5–6).

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My (Be)coming in the Borderlands To ‘ask while walking’ with the Afghan youth in this study also meant that I had to walk my own path. The journey of walking together and separately, made it possible for me to reflect on my own practices and face my own complicity in upholding coloniality. It was also an opening to a decolonial re-synthesis of my own being that allowed me to relearn things I had disassociated with. My reflections revealed that throughout my life, my formal education trained me to separate my living from my academic learnings, dividing and bordering the two domains. This dissociation was intensified when I, as an adolescent, migrated to Canada with my family. I remember feeling awkward and uncomfortable in physical education class which resulted in my dropping the subject altogether, despite that until that point, I had always enjoyed all sorts of physical activity and movements. The same thing happened in literature, arts, and drama classes. In Canada, my lived, cultural, and early academic knowledge was left out of what constituted knowledge. As such I learned to separate the two worlds of my education and my life. Through a pedagogy of detachment (Salinas, 2020), my academic life taught me that knowledge was only what I learned in school and university and as such binary oppositions were entrenched, ‘mind and the body, culture and nature, self and other, the coloniser and the colonised, the speaker and the spoken’ (Salinas, 2020, p. 23). Yet it was the journey of asking and walking with the youth in this study that afforded me to relearn and reclaim my own borderland existence. In a way, I always ‘sensed’ this space, I lived in it every day, but it was in recreating art as a place of enunciation, as an epistemology, that brought into re-existence that which was forgotten in myself. At the beginning of my doctoral research, after hearing of my plans to use art-based research, a colleague had asked me if I intended to incorporate art in the work of this research. At the time, I could not answer this question, how could I use art in an academic disseminating about sports? Using art to acquire information was one thing, but could art be an academic work on itself? Could a sport scholar create art that depicted knowledge about sports? I did not know then that while I was working to reconstitute the negated epistemology of Khorasan, I was also learning to re-synthesise myself and reclaim my place in the borderlands. Throughout this chapter, I have used verses of a poem I wrote (see Mashreghi, 2022b) to present the work of this research. The writing of this poem was unexpected and surprising to me. I had forgotten those parts of me that wanted to write and to create poetry. But it was the collaborative journey of this research which made me re-learn that: …poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought […] carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (2007, p. 36)

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As such, the praxis of asking while walking afforded me to re-enunciate what I had learned to dissociate from: my lived-felt reality. In re-synthesising this lived reality, which is an assemblage of all that I am, live, and experience every day, I also reclaimed my own borderland existence.

Conclusion Throughout this chapter, I have taken an epistemic shift to engage with poetry and art as an otherwise knowing-being that can contribute to the generation of knowledge within the field of sport, and life. In my work, privileging this epistemic space disrupted the hegemonic and universal understanding of sport and physical culture and contributed to decolonial work. This delinking from a modern/colonial knowledge system allowed the youth and I to dialogically work together to reveal an otherwise relationship with sports that produces otherwise meanings. Through poetry and art, we examined the ways sport is intertwined with life and as such a space of becoming and re-existing where life-affirming practices are enacted against the precarity of everyday bordering. Reclaiming the borderlands along with the Afghan youth, also opened the space for us to be together in our differences. Through the acknowledgement of our differences, it became possible for us to be together as people from Afghanistan and Iran, attentively and in new ways that traversed the bordering of our cultures, bodies, and histories. Working through our shared Khorasani heritage while simultaneously interrogating the different structural positions we inhabit as migrants in Scandinavia— i.e., gendered, classed, and legal status—rendered a space that exceeded coloniality and its bordering; and as such brought about a collective re-existence (Sykes & Hamzeh, 2018). This collective and separate journeying, also brought about my own re-synthesis and re-existence. Through this work, I too reconnected with my own place of enunciation which resulted in generation of a poem that works to disseminate academic knowledge. Turning the violence, trauma, and pain of everyday bordering into voices of hope and becoming, creating, and recreating of one’s world and future is how decoloniality is formed and advances. Acknowledgements Forever grateful to Yasamin, Ali, Hasan, Mohammad, Baset, Farhad, Shahla and Natalie for opening their hearts and allowing me to be their ally.

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Sepandarmaz Mashreghi , PhD, in interested in trans-disciplinary research at the intersection of leisure, sports, and decolonial thought. She is inspired by the works of Chicana, Black, Indigenous, and Southern scholars. Her focus has been on developing participatory and art-based practices to explore, analyse, and disseminate knowledge. Department of Sport Sciences, Malmö University.

Creative Writing Tools in the Exploration of Intersections of Sport and Society

Left Write Hook: ‘Boxing with the Boys’ Donna Lyon , Claire Gaskin , and Gabrielle Everall

Abstract This chapter is a critical reflection from three adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse, incest and rape on Boxing with the Boys, a component of the research project entitled Left Write Hook (LWH). The aim of LWH is to test the premise that the combination of writing and boxing in a group setting can help counter some of the long-term effects of childhood sexual abuse. Boxing with the Boys is one session within the LWH workshops series where the participants get in the boxing ring with trained boxers under the agreement that the boxers defend but do not hit back. The aim is to give the participants an experience of agency, strength, and power through writing and boxing. Our research adds to feminist sports scholarship that advocates for lived experience to redress gendered inequities. LWH intersects with research that supports the benefits of writing, with the caveat of adding survivor voices to public discourse, as opposed to remaining private and solely therapeutic. Our aim is to raise awareness around systemic socio-cultural and political problems that enable incest and rape. Keywords Writing · Boxing · Trauma · Child sexual abuse · Left write hook

Content note: this paper discusses personal accounts of rape, incest and the long-term and adverse effects of childhood sexual abuse. D. Lyon (B) University of Melbourne, Victorian College of the Arts, Southbank, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] C. Gaskin Deakin University, Burwood, VIC, Australia G. Everall University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_11

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Introduction Left Write Hook aims to use writing and boxing as a way to help counter the impact of trauma. In this chapter, three female adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse and rape critically reflect on Boxing with the Boys which is a component of Left Write Hook (LWH). LWH is a creative arts and sports intervention program, which resulted in an anthology book of participantts’ writings titled Left / Write // Hook: Survivor Stories from a Creative Arts Boxing and Writing Workshop (2021a, 2021b). In addition, a documentary film entitled Left Write Hook is currently under production. Boxing with the Boys is one session within LWH where trained boxers are invited to get in the boxing ring with the participants under the premise that they defend but do not punch back. In this chapter the founder Donna Lyon, a boxing coach, amateur boxer, film producer and academic reflects on facilitating the session, while at the same time navigating her own experiences of the long-term effects of trauma. Writer and academic Gabrielle Everall explores the way her male boxer subverts Freud’s notion of masochism. She utilises Jack Halberstam to challenge the way white masculinity has historically dominated boxing to reposition herself as empowered through her experience of Boxing with the Boys. Poet and academic Claire Gaskin explores creating the parameters to facilitate agency through the combination of timed writing exercises and the two-minute bouts within Boxing with the Boys. The aim of Boxing with the Boys is to help the traumatised body have an experience of agency and self-determination. Adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse often experience the suffering of ‘post-traumatic amnesia’ and the dissociation of mind and body (Herman, 1992/2015, p.45). Boxing with the Boys and LWH aims to challenge the entrenched notion of the mind–body duality underpinning traditional therapeutic practices. In LWH, boxing is positioned as trauma-informed physical practice that helps survivors channel stored trauma: Boxing not only helps the survivor to locate healthy aggression (van Ingen, 2011), but it can also position the survivor’s body as graceful, strong and powerful. This grants the body the respect that was taken away by the abusers. (Lyon et al., 2022)

When boxing is paired together with writing in LWH it has been shown to be an effective complement to existing modes of therapy (Lyon et al., 2020). The inclusion of writing at the beginning of the session aims to enable the survivor to access a deeper understanding of the impact of trauma and to identify similarities and differences with the other participants. Judith Herman talks about the traumatised body as ‘invaded, injured, defiled’ (2015, p. 53). In LWH, whatever comes up in the writing can be channeled through ‘a visceral sense of control’ (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 35). LWH aims to help the survivor expose and counter internalised barriers to healthy self-worth and, through boxing, to establish physical boundaries for emotional and psychological safety. In this chapter the authors’ voices and experiences are narrated separately but, remain interconnected through their solidarity and positionality as survivors. We

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claim that our lived experience is a form of qualitative research that positions the survivors’ voice as the locus of control in their representation, thus promoting personal agency. Due to Covid-19 and the program having to move online, the study of documentary filmmaking as a form of creative practice research through ethically engaged documentary and reflexive practice became limited. This chapter seeks to address the gap in this original research and extend on it through the lens of two survivors/ participants and the founder of the program.

Research Context: The Left Write Hook Program It was in 2019 that Donna Lyon founded Left Write Hook (LWH) as a grassroots community initiative. Three years later it has evolved into an evidence-based research project, book and documentary film. In contrast to Lyon’s early experiences with boxing where she fought in amateur and competitive settings, LWH was established on the basis of non-contact boxing (meaning no sparring or getting hit). Underpinning the program were principles of empowerment, agency and expression. In 2020, with the aid of a small group of researchers, Lyon attracted funding through the Creative Arts and Wellbeing Research Institute at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. This mixed methods research drew together a psychologist, gender expert and documentary filmmaker to measure the efficacy of the program on the wellbeing and agency of each participant. Through analysis of the psychological data over an eight-week program, the findings in fact did demonstrate a reduction in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), stress, depression, and an increase in empowerment and agency (see Lyon et al., 2020, pp. 72–74). A thematic analysis of the writings produced highlighted themes of empowerment, connection/ disconnection and validation (2020, p. 78). The researchers believe that ethically engaged documentary filmmaking seeks to amplify survivor voices and “empower the participants through a collaborative sharing of their experiences” to move towards post-traumatic growth (Lyon et al., 2020, p. 77).

Boxing Left Write Hook (LWH) founder Donna Lyon was drawn to boxing as a way to express the anger she knew was related to her childhood sexual abuse. As she began to learn boxing techniques and train in the sport, she began to feel the effects of dissociation, fear, and paralysis that she often shared in therapy. After training sessions she would often write about the experience to draw new connections. Alternative narratives began to appear that slowly re-positioned her body as a site of power and strength. Her experiences are supported by the research of scholar Cathy van Ingen who writes that feminist sport scholars have long advocated for theory to employ lived

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experience as a way to illuminate gendered disparities (van Ingen, 2020, p. 3). Brett Smith and Andrew C. Sparkes argue that ‘we not only tell stories about our bodies, but we also tell stories out of and through our bodies’ (p. 219,). Trauma researchers Judith Herman (1992/2015), Bessell van der Kolk (2014) and Panhofer (2011, 2017) assert that trauma lives in the body and therefore needs to be expressed through physical and mental means. Herman advocates that ‘Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships’ and that ‘the first principle of recovery is the empowerment of the survivor’ (1992/2015, p. 133) which supports the initiative that LWH is in a peer led and group setting. Boxing is strengths based, punching focuses on empowered movements that involve making contact with a bag or a pad in a controlled and precise manner. Boxing is a delicate interplay of abstraction and attention. Boxing demands you be loose and quick on your feet, yet centred and present. ‘Traumatized people chronically feel unsafe in their bodies, and there are few opportunities for women to access trauma-informed physical activity where they can experience being in charge of their own bodies’ (Gammage et al., 2022, p. 2). In LWH, the survivor begins to contemplate their body as a space to safely release stored trauma. The powerful and dynamic movements involved in boxing provide evidence to the survivors that they have a locus of control over their body during these moments.

Writing In LWH we responded to prompts in timed writing exercises as is the method attributed to Julia Cameron (2016), Pat Schneider (2003) and more recently Jen Cross (2017). We wrote freely and to resist editing out what is considered illogical, overly intense, or unacceptable. The forgotten, repressed, denied, and forbidden is consciously given permission to emerge. In LWH the writing emerged as prose poetry due to the intensity and focus of the group employing poetry’s recourse to the allusive, associative, and evocative. The survivor’s story has been deliberately denied and erased by the dominant narrative. Making sense in the traditional linear unambiguous voice is a privilege denied to survivors who suffer dissociation. Poetry is a particularly powerful tool for survivors who often express their story ‘in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility’ (Herman, 1992/2015, p. 1). However, Gaskin posits this is a valid means of finding voice for the inexpressible and unpalatable, it is a means of making connections between the seemingly disparate. A metaphor or image can be a way of approaching very painful material, it may ‘even constitute a bridge between detached and dissociative parts’ (Sagi, 2021, p. 159). Methods such as juxtaposition can identify what story the fragments evoke, and silences can be read through allusion. The evocative power of sensory language in poetry engages the intellect by integrating it with the emotional, it is a means to closing the gap between what is thought but not felt and felt but not thought.

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It works to include rather than exclude possibilities and potentialities, it is nondidactic, non-reductionist and a means to identify, dismantle and remake pre-existing prejudices. It has been evidenced in studies on the benefits of writing therapeutically that there is ‘the movement between three main sequences: from forgetting to remembering, from silence to speech (the testimony process), and from dissolution of the self to its cohesiveness’ (Sagi, 2021, p. 154). Many survivors experienced the abuse and then silencing, it was forbidden to speak the truth, even to self, so breaking the silence is paramount in breaking the hold of the abuse. Writing makes it possible to give voice to the effects of trauma and for this to be witnessed as it was in LWH by other survivors is validating. As Linnell and Cora state: When women get together in groups to explore what happened to them in childhood, they are likely to discover commonalities which immediately inform them that they have been tricked and manipulated by the abuser/s and others. They also provide each other with an immediate audience for the telling of new and preferred stories about themselves and their lives. (1993, p. 3)

Making the writings and our survivor stories public is important as remaining personal and private replicates the silencing of the abuse. It is therefore vital to give primacy to the voice of survivors (Arias & Johnson, 2013). This goes beyond James Pennebaker (1997) whose work restricts writing to the therapeutic. Survivors need to add their voice to public discourse, what is considered private and therefore lesser needs to become public and political so as to be potentially preventative. This is the power of writing and publishing.

Boxing with the Boys In the early iterations of Left Write Hook (LWH) Lyon had introduced a one-off session about six weeks into the program, whereby those who felt comfortable to do so, could step into the boxing ring and punch a trained male boxer. The first time we ran this the air vibrated with anxiety. There were tears and trepidation. Lyon knew the power of hitting someone, connecting your punch with an opponent rather than a bag. She writes about her experience with competitive boxing: I realised a part of me wanted to be in the ring so that people could see me getting abused. So people could see me beaten. I think I wanted sympathy. (Lyon, Diary entry, July 14, 2021c)

Boxing with the Boys counters and subverts the above so that what can be witnessed is empowerment. Lyon knew that the process of hitting without the possibility of getting hit back could be drawn upon in a structured environment and that it could become a powerful contribution to the documentary. After several discussions with the survivor participants everyone agreed to the experience, although it was clearly expressed that you could change your mind or withdraw at any time. Lyon organised the event at her old gym, a space she was familiar with. She brought in male boxers

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who supported the intentions of the program. She hired a 12-seater bus to travel with everyone, organised catering, and established crew and filming guidelines. The team consisted of fellow researcher Shannon Owen as writer/ director of the documentary, a director of photography, and a sound recordist. Lyon brought her dog to the event who acted as a support for the participants. The day started with a check in and then the introduction of two writing prompts. Prompt 1: Trusting the Process and Prompt 2: What would your body say if it could speak to you? The participants wrote for ten minutes and then shared their writings. This process took up the first hour and then the gym owner and the boxers arrived. Lyon took the participants through a short warm up and Tommy, the owner of the boxing gym, took the participants through a set of drill exercises that involved punching the bag. Connecting with the bag became an important immediate release of the anxiety and fear locked in many of the participants’ bodies. Shortly after these warm-up drills, each participant, when they were ready, stepped into the ring to confront a boxer. The ring acted as a closed space of consent. For two-by-two minute rounds, each survivor, sometimes timidly, sometimes with no inhibition, let go and became the aggressor. Here are our three personal testimonies from Boxing with the Boys.

Experience 1: The Facilitator Donna Lyon You tried to soothe yourself under hot water, caressing your arms. You were having a memory of being held upside down and strangled around your neck. You couldn’t breathe and gasped for breath. You longed to be brave to scream like the girls did on the weekend at Boxing with the Boys. You wanted to shake like them and release the terror inside you. You wanted to be comforted and soothed the way you held them but there was no one around. Daily activities took over and you were able to focus and get some marking done. Time ticked along and soon you rolled into therapy. All you wanted to do was crawl through that door. But you had gained some clarity and as you relayed the pain you had been feeling, she guided you to the floor area with pillows and you lay down shaking. (Lyon, Diary entry, November 26, 2021c)

The day was carefully planned. Trauma informed practice necessitates the need for transparency, trust, choice, and establishing safety (Bloom, 2013; Harris & Fallot, 2001). We had a number of meetings. I produced a call sheet with clear details and instructions around the day, what we were doing, what people should wear, time allocations, safety notes and more. When we arrived, the documentary camera team set up and we, as survivors, sat in a circle and shared how we felt. Survivors are often disconnected and cannot describe their feelings, so this is a deliberate strategy to focus the attention on the body (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 116). The room was full of anxiety and tension. I spoke to this. I read out a statement from van der Kolk: ‘How can people gain control over the residues of past trauma and return to being masters of their own ship?’ (2014, p. 4). He goes on to suggest that; ‘talking, understanding, and human connection can help, and drugs can dampen

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hyperactive alarm systems’ (Kolk, 2014, p. 4). His next suggestion speaks to the power of LWH: ‘…the imprints from the past can be transformed by having physical experiences that directly contradict the helplessness, rage, and collapse that are part of trauma, and thereby regaining self-mastery’ (Kolk, 2014, p. 4). Van der Kolk is clear that this is not a one size fits all approach as it depends on the person in recovery. Yet, he also asserts that each of these interventions can produce ‘profound changes’ (2014, p. 4). I believe that Boxing with the Boys is about regaining self-mastery through having a physical experience that seeks to reverse powerlessness. I reminded everyone that each person was in control. They could punch and would not be punched back. They could hit and would not be hit back. They could express and would not be shut down. Trusting the process, flying off into the unknown. Deep surrender. Fall downstairs. Trusting the process. Walk through space. Moving, seeing, self-conscious, step outside of self, conscious, unconscious, trusting the process. Process of trust, letting go, the hardest thing I did was to let go, the most freeing, you held my arms*

When we started warming up by hitting the bags, I knew we were going to be okay. The rage felt palpable. There was something about knowing the bag could take our anger. Surrendering, an abstract process, mental trappings, as I wandered through dark forest, caught in broken branches. Process trusting, better than outcome, better than seeing end result, left with nothing, but knowing the process will begin again each time, rolling around on carpet, wrapped in soot, wipe clean my brow of sweat, trusting the process.

The first survivor that got in the ring with the boys screamed when she hit him. It was a guttural scream that shook my body. I stood outside of the ring watching her in awe. Her ability to be so vulnerable in this group impressed me. I am still unsure as to whether I could be that brave. Sounds in the room, old tin shed, creaking roof, birds screeching, I am attuned to the sounds around, sonic interference, process interruption, trusting, so hard to trust anything. Admit that it is nigh impossible when you betrayed me, the first step in reclamation.

When she left the ring, she fell to the floor and started shaking. I held her and said ‘there, there’ as though she was my child. I wanted to affirm her experience. I whispered; ‘the body needs you to express this, you are safe, just let it pass through’. I witnessed her vulnerable expression. She seemed to be trusting the process. How can a child be betrayed? Adult actions on a tiny brain, mature concepts on an immature body. Broken heart for a broken child. Trusting the process is silence, sound, silence, sound, silence, sound, heavy breathing, heart beating.

Later I became worried that the process was retraumatising the women. My experience as a survivor has meant that at times I have processed memory through shaking my body and this has helped me to release the memory and its emotions. I had to trust this. I felt privileged to be the facilitator of this experience. I returned to the research of van der Kolk, Herman and Panhofer. The men just stood in the ring and took the punches. Later when I spoke to one of them he thanked me for the experience. He had a black eye.

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Wheels grumbling across the concrete floor. Bells ringing, planes soar overhead, birds in a tree gossip. Trusting the process. Squeaky sneakers in hyper masculine space. Broken. Interrupted.

At the end of the session, we ate and debriefed and grounded ourselves. It was interesting to note that some people expressed that they felt guilty for punching the men, whereas others didn’t at all. We drove home on the bus and some people sang. The next day I checked in to the group via Facebook Messenger. I wanted to remind everyone about the principles of LWH—personal agency, empowerment, and expression. We talked about practices of grounding and self-care. People expressed exhilaration, exhaustion and the need to contextualise this experience within an ongoing process of our post-traumatic healing. *The italicised section in this piece is writing that was written by Lyon on the day of Boxing with the Boys, Saturday 20 November 2021, in response to the prompt: Trusting the Process.

Experience 2: Re-Writing Trauma Claire Gaskin We affectionately called it Boxing with the Boys, I love the alliteration and the humour in that the attempt at equalising is ridiculous. They are men and skilled boxers. I am a 56-year-old poet and survivor of incest, domestic violence, and rape. Complaints against boxing include that it is violent and uncivilised. Joyce Carol Oates says of watching a boxing match that ‘one thinks helplessly, this can’t be happening. Even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening’ (1987, p.105). Horrors people cannot believe happen, do happen, this is one of the lessons of boxing. Boxing is real and ugly; one deliberately tries to hurt another. Boxing has its roots in slavery and ‘gladiatorial combat’ (Oates, 1987, p. 41). Inequities have transformed but have not been abolished. Boxing is traditionally a place where disenfranchised working-class men get to fight, but they are not fighting class inequalities they fight each other. Working-class people who have been brutalised go to jail or find something like boxing, sometimes in jail, middle-class people go to therapy, upper-class people go to resort-like therapy centres and do expensive workshops. What has your experience been? Do you live in a civilised world where you have never been physically overpowered and hurt by someone stronger than you? If you have been overpowered, you do not live in a civilised world, and I am sorry. We live in a world where people of a certain sensibility do not feel boxing can be incorporated into civilised society but, domestic violence, rape, and incest are accepted as inevitabilities in the same supposed civilised society. My every day is a fight with ‘the impossibility of living’ (Caruth, 2016, p. 62). I live suspended in the non-doing and non-being of knowing it is going to happen and being able to do nothing about it, this state has no limits and no boundaries. To call me a survivor supposes that the event I survived is over; it is not,

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every day is a fight against its effects. Oates resists the writerly temptation of saying boxing is a metaphor for something else, she says, ‘life is a metaphor for boxing’ (1987, p. 4). She says that because you are evenly matched and fight someone in your weight category, ‘it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you’ (1987, p. 4). I was not evenly matched, and my fight was not metaphorically with myself. I started life having lost the fight, but I have what in the boxing world is called ‘heart’, the ability to keep fighting after being beaten (1987, p. 10). When someone more physically powerful wanted to overpower me, they did and any resistance was futile, it was just about endurance and getting up after being knocked out to live to be defeated another day. The first time I participated in Boxing with the Boys I was standing around while the coach we had invited in explained some principles about boxing, including: it is not about anger. Anger definitely can take a lot of energy away from the drive and skills needed to survive everyday inequities. I was looking around at the other women and wondering why they had a look of horror on their faces, the men were going to defend but not hit back. I thought I was alright, and then I had a body memory. When I got in the ring, I was encouraged to hit and hit hard in a two-minute round. I asked Chris, who I was hitting, if I could hit him around the head, he offered an enthusiastic, ‘yes’. In that enthusiasm I experienced a generosity in empathy I have never felt before. At the end, Chris and I hugged, in that hug there was no class or gender difference; there was what I viscerally and wordlessly felt, two survivors having survived another fight with autonomy, defying all who see us existing only for their use and abuse. There was solidarity. There was trust, he had said he would not hit back, and he had not, it was intimate. In Boxing with the Boys, a fiction was created where the less physically powerful win because the ones with more physical power and boxing skills withheld their power for three two-minute rounds. Oates says, ‘each boxing match is a story – a unique and highly condensed drama without words’ (1987, p. 8). This fiction gave me an experience of safety I have never felt before. It proved to me that if the experience of safety does not exist you can create it by creating the conditions for it. You can create limits and boundaries to feel safe and have agency. The initial abuse was about having my boundaries violated, without personal limits I felt oceanic. Before we got in the ring, I did my timed writing exercise within the confines of my 110 mms times 210 mms notebook on lined paper. I see my experience existing; it has physical reality on the stage of the page. I can perform and test perspectives. This discipline, this self-rule within control counters the sense of formlessness felt after trauma. Marlene NourbeSe Philip talks about the freedom within limits that poetry enables and that this is helpful after tragedy (Saunders, 2005, p. 65). Poetry is particularly well placed to give form to the experience of trauma in its intensity with recourse to the evocative, allusive, and associative, which are all ways the traumatised person can be involved in sense making. A Shakespearean sonnet is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a strict rhyme scheme, you can obey all the constraints or just the ones you choose to as in the tradition of the contemporary sonnet. In doing this you can give form to the formless, to the unspeakable of love and other formless and wordless experiences.

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You can create your own forms and fictions as we created in Boxing with the Boys, to inhabit the experience of fighting back, of not being frozen in fear, in bouts of two-minute durations in a 5.5 to 6.7 m square stage surrounded by four strands of rope. I did not fight to hurt anyone but to win against the opponent of my own defencelessness. I was yelled at and encouraged by the coach and the other women; this was being evidenced by being witnessed. I may not be able to defeat my feelings of defencelessness all day every day but, I can do it for a two-minute bout and these two-minute bouts can connect with other two-minute bouts. The effects of trauma are well documented, one experience is of a break in linearity and causality because it was too quick and too much to integrate, ‘the future is no longer continuous with the past but is united with it through a profound discontinuity’ (Caruth, 2016, p. 14). My writing is evidence of unbroken consciousness just as the two-minute bouts are evidence I can hit and not cower.

Experience 3. Was My Male Boxer a Masochist? Gabrielle Everall I found participating in Boxing with the Boys the most powerful experience I have ever had. Afterwards I had never felt so uplifted in all my life. Even I had the guts to get in the ring with my male boxer. I was told to punch him in the chest. ‘Hit me here’, he said gesturing toward the skull on his black t-shirt. I would punch him and punch him and then stop. He would demand ‘Come on HIT ME! HIT ME!’ I thought my male boxer must be a masochist. Subverting Freud’s idea that masochism is predominantly a female aberration (1953, p. 132). When I was a small girl in the early hours of the misty Victorian mornings, I would hear my father take my three brothers to boxing. I was forbidden from attending because I was a girl. I remember my father would watch a football show on a Saturday or Sunday morning. It involved men hand passing footballs through a hole. Penetration aside. Some survivors participating in Boxing with the Boys felt guilt about punching their male boxers. I however, felt no guilt at all. Especially as my male boxer was emphatically insisting that I punch him over and over. My male boxer appeared to be trying support my recovery as a survivor of incest and sexual assault. My male boxer’s behaviour Freud would call ‘masochism’. Freud saw women as masochists. It was a bit like my male boxer was being feminine. Something our society frowns upon in men. Yet, masochism in men particularly in boxing is actually in keeping with dominant constructions of white male masculinity. Like Jake La Motta from Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese (1980/2005) my male boxer says ‘punch me’ only to me, not to my brother. It is about how much abuse the white male boxer can withstand where he comes out victorious. Jack Halberstam in Female Masculinities writes how, ‘the masculinity of the boxer is determined not by how quickly he can knock the other

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guy out but by how many punches the boxer can take without going down himself” (2019, p. 274). Halberstam defines white male masculinity as a double system of, ‘a lack of care for the self and a callous disregard for the care of others’ (2019, p. 274). Indeed, the construction of white male masculinity is a dual process that places a burden on men but also expresses itself through violence toward others, namely women (Halberstam, 2019, p. 274). Yet ironically my white male boxer is asking a woman (me) to hit or punch him. It is as if he is aware that men abuse women and knows it is his time for payback. But he seems to be supporting this. However, it is masochistic and in keeping with dominant constructions of white male masculinity. Jack Halberstam writes: … masochism is built into male masculinity and the most macho of spectacles is the battered male body, a bloody hunk of ruined flesh stumbling out of the corner for yet another round. (2019, p. 275)

But how does the dominant discourse of white male masculinity impact on girls and women who want to box? At the age of thirteen Jack Halberstam who was assigned female at birth, wanted boxing gloves and a punching bag for his birthday. Halberstam was forbidden from boxing because he was assigned a girl at birth. When I was prohibited from going with my brothers and my father to boxing when I was a young girl I felt very upset by my exclusion. Halberstam felt ‘rage’ (2019, p. 268), I too felt angry. He speaks of the prohibitions placed on girls in society; ‘Society tells girls in all kinds of ways that they must accept and take on femininity by giving up sports and active behaviour in general’ (Halberstam, 2019, p. 267). Halberstam says this is because of ‘binary gender systems’ (Halberstam, 2019, p. 268). An example of this gender binary is male/female, active/passive. Halberstam views the prohibition against girls as ‘an expulsion of pre-teen female masculinity’ (Halberstam, 2019, p. 268). Qualities such as ‘aggression’, ‘speed’ and ‘activity’ are partitioned away from women and femininity to the point that if a woman is aggressive she is seen as dangerous. Contrary to this, women who are active and engage in sport live healthier lives (Halberstam, 2019, p. 269). In keeping with hegemonic femininity, I detested sport as a teenager. I used many sick notes from my mother, so I did not have to participate. I was scared of masculinity and the way I perceived sport was masculine. At first, I was too scared to participate in LWH because I thought boxing would be too masculine and too aggressive if not violent. But with Boxing with The Boys I was allowed to express my anger in a safe space where the masculinity of my male boxer was not threatening. LWH and Boxing with the Boys disrupts the gender binary of feminine/masculine. Where women such as myself who are perceived as feminine have the chance to express their masculinity. But does rage have a gender? Surely rage can be both masculine and feminine. What is masculine and feminine? For women who engage in boxing the issue of how this ‘endangers femininity’ is raised in the media and elsewhere relentlessly (Halberstam, 2019, p. 270). In an interview with female boxers, boxing was actually viewed as an expression of their femininity not masculinity (Halberstam, 2019, p. 270). It is as if masculinity in women does not exist.

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The prohibition against female boxers both black and white is evident in Halberstam’s research into the history of boxing in the United States (2019). Halberstam writes that women were banned from boxing in the United States until 1977 (2019). In 1977 it was ascertained that the prohibition against women boxers went against federal and state equal protection laws by the state supreme court in New York County (Halberstam, 2019, p. 271). The New York Athletic Commission (NYAC) reacted strongly against this ruling arguing that women’s boxing would ruin boxing and destroy the credibility of fighting (Halberstam, 2019, p. 271). They believed women’s boxing would ‘damage women’s breasts and reproductive organs’ (Halberstam, 2019, p. 271). One white woman and two black women were granted boxing licenses where the white woman became a celebrity and the black women ‘faded into obscurity’ (Halberstam, 2019, p. 271). It is as if masculinity has to be embodied by whiteness. The exclusion of girls and women from expressing their female masculinity, the enforcement of Victorian values of femininity onto girls and women, the hegemonic embodiment of white men as masculinity only, are all subverted with boxing programs such as LWH. In Boxing with the Boys my male boxer is prevented from boxing against me, and I am allowed to express my female masculinity or feminine rage against him. He becomes what Freud calls women, ‘masochistic.’ The only way I could see LWH improving is a greater representation of women of colour in its ranks.

A Shared Understanding and Future Considerations Lyon’s experience as a facilitator of Boxing with the Boys demonstrates the power and complexity inherent in a survivor/peer led project. While facilitating Left Write Hook, she is transparent about navigating the experience of managing the long-term effects of her trauma. She needed to trust the process of writing, boxing, and then boxing the boys and to locate it in research that supports the need for a survivor to have a visceral empowering experience to safely release stored trauma. Despite the day being grounded in trauma-informed principles, on reflection it became clear that she herself needed more support as the facilitator. When she returned to the principles underpinning LWH (strength, personal agency, and empowerment), she regained confidence that the experience was ultimately a cathartic one. However, it is a finding and something to consider for further iterations of LWH. The recommendation would be for the facilitator to formalise a debriefing process for themselves with the participants. Gaskin found Boxing with the Boys an experience of solidarity and trust beyond gender and class, that extended beyond the LWH participants. She found power in the notion of creating the conditions for an experience of safety. She found this helped to counter the effects of trauma being boundaryless and limitless due to the initial abuse being about violations. She found that creating boundaries and limits through timed writing exercises and two-minute bouts of boxing gave her an opportunity to

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perform agency that could be transferable to other aspects of life such as informed decision making. To strengthen taking action towards autonomy as opposed to being acted upon and fated to be defenceless. Everall’s section critically reflects on how historically, masculinity has been the preserve of white male embodiment. She argues that LWH and Boxing with the Boys disrupts this hegemony. Everall found her white male boxer who demanded that she hit him subverts Freud’s idea that masochism is largely a female domain. Everall felt her boxer helped to support her as a victim/survivor of incest and rape. She says however, as noted by Halberstam, dominant constructions of white male masculinity are masochistic. She felt that her experience of participating in Boxing with the Boys improved her self-esteem. She was surprised at the strength she had in her experience of boxing her male boxer. We would recommend that in further iterations of a program like LWH and Boxing with the Boys a diversity of voices should be amplified. We acknowledge that this chapter is using the personal testimonies of three white women and is not representative of the general community of survivors.

Conclusion This research builds on the findings of an earlier mixed methods study over an eightweek period of Left Write Hook (LWH) (2020). The findings were that there was a reduction in the participants’ PTSD symptoms, depression, and stress, and an increase in personal agency and wellbeing. The survivors’ personal agency is demonstrated in the meaning making evidenced in the book Left / Write // Hook: Survivor Stories from a Creative Arts Boxing and Writing Workshop (2021a) which enables it to be shared with the wider public. This sense making experience will be further reinforced by the participant’s involvement in the ethically engaged filmmaking process in the documentary entitled Left Write Hook. In Boxing with the Boys our findings are illustrated by our lived experience evidenced through our personal testimonies as a form of qualitative research. This is an interpretive process of our experiences, internal to ourselves as knowers. This positions the survivor with as much agency as the researcher. It is very rare that the survivor is part of a collaborative research process where they are both researcher and participant. LWH subverts traditional research methods of participants being researched on and written about and facilitates them remaining in control of their representation through the findings. The uniqueness of LWH is that it is survivor-informed and collaboratively led by participants in the program. In this chapter, we have drawn on the professionality and expertise of two survivors in the program, who are established thinkers in the field of the intersection between writing and the effects of trauma. This is along with the facilitator who brings her academic and creative practice research expertise in the field of screen production.

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This chapter has been a collaborative effort of three survivors who remain in control of their own representation. This research adds to feminist sports scholarship advocating for lived experience to redress gendered inequities. LWH intersects with research that supports the benefits of writing beyond the therapeutic. We have posited that it is vital to not replicate the silencing of the abuse by silencing survivors through pathologizing. Our aim has been to raise awareness around systemic socio-cultural and political problems that enable incest and rape through our personal testimonies and critical reflection on our experience in Boxing with the Boys as part of the LWH program. Acknowledgements This research has been funded by the Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Research Initiative (CAWRI) of the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music.

Bibliography Arias, B. J., & Johnson, C. V. (2013). Voices of healing and recovery from childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 22(7), 822–841. https://doi.org/10.1080/10538712.2013.830669 Bloom, S. L. (2013). Creating sanctuary: Toward the evolution of sane societies (Revised). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. Berger, J. (1997). Review: Trauma and literary theory. Contemporary Literature, 38(3), 569–582. https://doi.org/10.2307/1208980 Cameron, J. (2016). The artist’s way: A spiritual path to higher creativity. TarcherPerigee. Caruth, C. (2016). Unclaimed experience: Trauma, narrative, and history. JHU Press. Cross, J. (2017). Writing ourselves whole: Restoring our lives. http://www.writingourselveswhole. org/Images/WritingWholeSurvivorsWrite(free_ebook).pdf. Harris, M., & Fallot, R. (2001). Creating cultures of trauma-informed care (CCTIC): A selfassessment and planning protocol. National Children’s Advocacy Centre. https://calio.dspace direct.org/handle/11212/4468 Freud, S., Strachey, J., Freud, A., Rothgeb, C. L., & Richards, A. (1953). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth Press. Gammage, K. L., van Ingen, C., & Angrish, K. (2022). Measuring the effects of the shape your life project on the mental and physical health outcomes of survivors of gender-based violence. Violence against Women, 28(11), 2722–2741. https://doi.org/10.1177/10778012211038966 Halberstam, J. (2019). Female masculinity: Twentieth anniversary edition with a new preface. Duke University Press. Herman, J. L. (1992/2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence—From domestic abuse to political terror. Basic Books. van Ingen, C. (2011). Spatialities of anger: Emotional geographies in a boxing program for survivors of violence. Sociology of Sport Journal, 28(2), 171–188. https://doi.org/10.1123/ssj.28.2.171 van Ingen, C. (2020). Stabbed, shot, left to die: Christy Martin and gender-based violence in boxing. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 56(8), 1154–1171. https://doi.org/10.1177/101 2690220979716 Linnell, S. (1993). Discoveries: a group resource guide for women who have been sexually abused in childhood / co-authored by Sheridan Linnell & Dorothy Cora. Dympna House. Lyon, D. (Ed.) (2021a). Left / Write // Hook: Survivor Stories from a Creative Arts Boxing and Writing Project. Loving Healing Press. Lyon, D. (2021b, November 20 Saturday). Trusting the process [Unpublished raw data]. Lyon, D. (2021c, November 26). Diary entry.

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Lyon, D., Gaskin, C., & Everall, G. (2022). Writing + boxing = left / write // hook. TEXT, 26 (Special 67), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.37824. Lyon, D., Owen, S., Osborne, M. S., Blake, K., & Andrades, B. (2020). Left / Write // Hook: A mixed method study of a writing and boxing workshop for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. International Journal of Wellbeing, 10(5), 64–82. https://doi.org/10.5502/ijw.v10i5. 1505 Oates, J. C. (1987). On boxing. Bloomsbury. Panhofer, H. (2017). Body memory and its recuperation through movement. In V. Karkou, S. Oliver, & S. Lycouris (Eds.), The oxford handbook of dance and wellbeing (pp. 114–28). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199949298.013.7 Panhofer, H., & Payne, H. (2011). Languaging the embodied experience. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 6(3), 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/17432979.2011.572625 Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162–166. Sagi, B. (2021). “Only when it’s written here”: personal writing as testimony in the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Poetry Therapy, 34(3), 150–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/088 93675.2021.1921475 Saunders, P. (2005). Trying tongues, e-raced identities, and the possibilities of be/longing: Conversations with NourbeSe Philip. Journal of West Indian Literature 14(1/2), 202–19. http://www. jstor.org/stable/23020018. Schneider, P. (2003). Writing alone and with others. Oxford University Press. Scorsese, M. (Director). (1980). Raging bull [Film]. Chartoff-Winkler productions. In Scorsese: The Martin Scorsese film collection (2005). MGM Home Entertainment. Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (2009). Narrative inquiry in sport and exercise psychology: What can it mean, and why might we do it? Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 10(1), 1–11. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2008.01.004 Thomas, S. (2012). Collaboration and ethics in documentary filmmaking—A case study. New review of film and television studies, 10(3), 332–343. https://doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.695979 Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Mind, brain and body in the transformation of trauma. Penguin Books.

Dr Donna Lyon is a Senior Lecturer at University of Melbourne, based in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA Film and Television in the master of producing program. She produced the independent feature film Disclosure, nominated for Best Independent Film AACTA 2021 and winner of the ATOM Awards for Best Fiction Feature Film 2021. She is the Founder of the writing and boxing program, Left Write Hook, for female-identifying survivors of childhood sexual abuse and trauma. Dr Claire Gaskin is in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. A bud, her first full length collection of poetry, was released by John Leonard Press in 2006, and was shortlisted in the John Bray SA Festival Awards for Literature in 2008. Her collection, Paperweight was published in 2013 by Hunter Publishers. Her collection, Eurydice Speaks was published with Hunter Publishers in 2021. Ismene’s Survivable Resistance was released in 2021 with Puncher & Wattmann. Dr Gabrielle Everall is in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Western Australia. She has written two books of poetry. The first Dona Juanita and the love of boys was published in its second edition in 2020. John Kinsella said it was one of the best books for 2020 in the Australian Book Review. Her second book Les Belles Lettres was published in 2017 by Girls on Key Press.

It Doesn’t Happen by Magic: Creatively Exploring the Process of Changemaking in Sport Through Moya Dodd and FIFA Catherine Ordway

and Kasey Symons

Abstract Football (soccer), the world’s most popular sport, carries a legacy of gender exclusion. Women were banned from playing in many jurisdictions and remain largely absent from its leadership. Implicit and/or conscious biases perpetuate the under-development and under-resourcing of the women’s game, and the under-representation of women in decision-making roles, ‘the long-standing lack of women in positions of responsibility in the football community means there have been limited voices to advocate for change’ (FIFA, 2018, p. 4). In parallel, allegations of corruption have accompanied football, its officials, and its governing bodies (including the international federation, FIFA) for many years, with limited progress or accountability. In May 2015, the raids and arrest of senior FIFA officials triggered a corruption crisis, which provided the impetus for structural change. In the ensuing chaos, FIFA faced an overwhelming imperative for reform. At FIFA’s Congress in February 2016, a number of Statute amendments were approved, reflecting a growing acknowledgement and commitment to women in football. This chapter provides an insider’s view through Moya Dodd, one of the first women on FIFA’s Executive Committee. During the corruption crisis of 2015, she submitted reform proposals and gave voice to the broader community of support for gender reforms in FIFA. We show the power of including lived experience through autoethnographic and reflective writing practice in formal evaluations of policy change for women in sport. Additionally, we encourage more practitioners to include creative writing practice to give voice to those driving change and highlight the process by which progress towards gender equality was, and can be, achieved. Keywords Women in football · Gender equality · Sports policy · Reflective writing · FIFA C. Ordway (B) University of Canberra, Bruce, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] K. Symons Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 L. McGowan and K. Symons (eds.), Intersections of Sport and Society in Creative Writing, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5585-5_12

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Introduction It is well recognised that sport has traditionally been developed by and for men (Hargreaves, 2002), and women have had to struggle to be included and resist being silenced. Football, arguably the world’s most popular sport, carries a legacy of gender exclusion which remains challenging to surmount (Davinson Raycraft et al., 2021). Not only were women effectively banned from playing football in numerous countries, most infamously in the UK in 1921 (see Williams, 2013 on the bans in the UK and Onwumechili, 2011 on experiences of bans in Nigeria), they continue to strive for recognition and acceptance in many other jurisdictions (see Crawford & McGowan, 2019; Pfister, 2006). In some countries, women remain prohibited from even attending men’s sport, as was highlighted in the tragic death of Iranian football fan Sahar Khodayari in 2019. Nicknamed ‘Blue Girl’, Sahar died in hospital after setting herself on fire outside a court in Tehran to protest her charge of ‘appearing in public without a hijab’ after trying to enter Azadi Stadium dressed as a man, defying the nation’s ban on women in sports stadiums (Lewis, 2019). Subsequently, the thenAfghan Football President, Keramuddin Keram, was later banned from football for life after the Afghan women’s team turned to the international players’ association, FIFPRO, for support following sexual abuse between 2013–18 (CAS, 2020; Panja & Nordland, 2019). Mirroring the highly publicised cases of abuse against boys in football from the UK (Woodward, 2016) and the Netherlands (Majoor, 2022), women footballers from countries as widespread as Gabon, Canada, Colombia, Haiti, and Ecuador have made claims of abuse or other inappropriate conduct at the hands of male football officials (Panja, 2020). Implicit and/or conscious biases perpetuate the under-development and underresourcing of the women’s game, and the under-representation of women in decisionmaking roles (Davinson Raycraft et al., 2021, pp. 15–16). Undoubtedly this also explains the absence of women from football leadership (Davinson Raycraft et al., 2021; Ordway, 2023). The international body responsible for promoting the game, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), unless forced to respond through public pressure as the case study here demonstrates, has historically been silent on these inequities and human rights abuses. While the structural omission and active exclusion of women in sport paints an unpromising picture, there have been, and still are, champions and advocates who work tirelessly to drive change for women in sport. This chapter provides a rare first-person insight to give voice to one of those advocates for change. Moya Dodd, former Australian player, lawyer, and national board member, when given a seat at the international table, seized the opportunity presented through the FIFA corruption crisis to achieve once in a generation gender equality reforms. Through written reflections, Dodd describes how she worked with stakeholders to create an avenue for change and used the platforms she created and co-opted to speak on behalf of the organisation. Dodd drove the narrative for FIFA and footballers around the world to create the momentum for a reorientation towards a re-imagined fairness.

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While the calls for change internationally had created an environment challenging gender inequality, and to drive gender equity conversations in sport, the changes evident on the ground were minimal. The International Working Group (IWG) on Women and Sport 1994 Brighton Declaration became the Brighton plus Helsinki 2014 Declaration on Women and Sport (IWG, 2014). In 2015, all United Nations (UN) Member States adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. One of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals is to: ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’ (UN, 2015). Following the FIFA reforms, policies including the Kazan Action Plan (UNESCO, 2017) and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) Gender Equality Review Project (IOC, 2018), for example, created a wave of change towards achieving gender equality more broadly in sport. While FIFA had become a signatory to the IWG Brighton plus Helsinki Declaration in March 2015 (IWG, 2020), the pressure from law enforcement and football stakeholders following the arrest of several high-profile FIFA members on corruption charges (in May and December 2015) created an environment where inaction was untenable. Progressive and pragmatic FIFA members looked to seize the opportunity this presented. One of those who saw the crisis as an opening was Dodd. This chapter describes and reflects on the process which led to the overwhelming representation of male voting members of FIFA approving the most progressive gender equality provisions to date within a range of governance reforms in 2016. To do this, we employ an autoethnographical, reflexive writing practice (see Holman Jones, 2016; Smith & Dean, 2009) that captures the lived experience of Dodd, whose authority to speak as a former elite player and a lawyer, and her position as a member of the FIFA Council was instrumental to driving change for women in football. It demonstrates that different styles and creative approaches to reflective writing on these issues not only provide insight into sports governance practices for sports management academics and professionals, but also add the often excluded and/or ignored voices and lived experiences of women back into sports narratives and research. In doing so, this chapter underlines the importance of, not just including the voices of those women intimately involved with these events, but the centring of those voices. In this way, we aim to add to the learnings and understandings of the ways change is being driven by and for women in sport.

Autoethnography and Reflexive Writing in Sport Management Taking an interdisciplinary approach through legal and sports management lenses this chapter analyses the process by which structural gender equality reforms were achieved by amending the FIFA Statutes and related regulations in early 2016. This professional practice research reflexively examines the learnings from an ‘insider’ directly involved in FIFA’s governance reform (Costley, 2010, pp. 30–31). We intend that these learnings are extrapolated for other sports and in broader contexts, through

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‘link[ing] critical theory with current practice to bring [this chapter] to life through … [a] dedicated critique of [a] contemporary case’ (Schulenkorf & Frawley, 2017, p. 3). Additionally, the use of reflective autoethonographical writing alongside the critical examination of these structural changes and overall analysis of FIFA’s gender equality challenges allows for a creative way of positioning research and researcher in the field of women’s sport development. In introducing their co-edited special issue of the Sport Management Review, ‘Contemporary qualitative research methods in sport management’ (2017), Larena Hoeber and Sally Shaw state that there is an: ‘absence of qualitative methodologies that differ from the norm for structuring research projects’ (Hoeber & Shaw, 2017, p. 5). Their introduction goes on to frame the power of challenging: ‘traditional ways of thinking about how qualitative research should be done and what is ‘good research’. Hoeber and Shaw suggest that by encouraging sports management scholars to employ more diverse, different and creative qualitative methods, ‘they may, in this way, engender positive change where traditional approaches have not’ (Hoeber & Shaw, 2017, p. 5). Stride et al. (2017) reflect on the work of Amis and Silk (2005) identifying that rigid models and frameworks can sometimes limit research in the field of sport management highlighting that ‘[t]hey argue that “sport management is a field blinkered by its disciplinarity” (Amis & Silk, 2005, p. 360) and note the progressive work in areas like sport sociology to call for innovative thinking and approaches in sport management research’ (Stride et al., 2017, p. 33). Stride et al. suggest narrative inquiry (see Connelly & Clandinin, 2006) is an important and underused tool in sport management methodology to explore lived experiences through storytelling, highlighting that: [w]ithin a sport management context, for example, people tell stories all the time. Whether it is the frontline staff … talking about working with event volunteers, or customers discussing their experiences of being a member of a large health club. … The stories emerging within and from these settings enable others to make sense of how the storyteller is understanding their particular experience(s). (Stride et al., 2017, p. 35)

From a creative arts perspective, Steven Pace (2012) investigates the process of writing the self into research by using grounded theory/ies in autoethnography through a mixed methods approach (see also Creswell, 2009). Pace argues that ‘the thoughtful application of mixed research methods can provide new insights into challenging problems such as the study of human creativity’ and describes the approach as ‘bowerbird’ in style, bringing together data and ideas from a range of disciplines and fields to build a more imaginative approach to research in the creative space (Pace, 2012, p. 13). Including Dodd’s reflections, thoughts and feelings from her lived experiences as a former athlete and passionate advocate for the game, alongside the commentary, analysis, and evaluation of the work she was intimately involved with in her role at FIFA, speaks to this interdisciplinary mixed method approach. This chapter explores the opportunities Hoeber and Shaw promote and offers a way to include storytelling in an autoethnographic, reflective manner. It further seeks to add to policy evaluation

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and forms recommendations by connecting sport management research practices to creative approaches.

The ‘Intimate’ Insider Moya Dodd is a celebrated advocate for women’s football and is universally recognised as having had a long and dedicated involvement in promoting the world game. As an international player, Dodd appeared in the very first FIFA-organised women’s international match for Australia vs Brazil in the inaugural 1988 women’s tournament (Crawford & McGowan, 2019), known as the pilot World Cup. Twenty-five years later, Dodd joined FIFA’s Executive Committee, by then having served as a director of the Football Federation Australia (now Football Australia), and as a Vice President of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) and chair of the AFC Women’s Committee for several years. During that period, Dodd had become known for her advocacy for women, (for example, in the campaign to lift the ban on women wearing a headscarf on the field: Crawford & McGowan, 2019; Prouse, 2015), both inside and outside the formal governance structures of football. These roles gave Dodd the opportunity to engage with leading figures in world football, such as then FIFA President Sepp Blatter, from as early 2007. The process of seeking election in 2013 also required extensive engagement with decision-makers within FIFA from around the globe. These experiences and roles gave her an ‘intimate insider’ (Taylor, 2011) position of privilege; to not only observe and understand, but also to influence, the events unfolding. Dodd recounts the sequence of events, and ‘joins the dots’ here, based on her own recollections and observations, supported by the contemporaneous documentary evidence available. As described by DeDiego and Moret (2017), autoethnography ‘serves as a constructive interpretation process. … Reflexive writing examines the researcher perspective within social context connecting action, memory, and meaning’ (pp. 130–131). Writing reflexively in this context then can also be considered an ‘autoethnographic life review’, as the events of 2015–6 provide a punctuation point in history that gives Dodd the opportunity to look back on decisions made and action taken with the benefit of hindsight to determine where to prioritise future endeavours (Ellis, 2013). Coming into FIFA’s exclusive, almost entirely male, environment as a relative newcomer, Dodd’s ‘insider’ position can also be considered from a feminist perspective as an ‘outsider’, where ‘women’s situated experience was able to express knowledge that had hitherto been marginalised or ignored’ (Harding, 1987 cited in Costley, 2010, p. 30). Dodd observed at the 2019 Equality Summit that, ‘Football governance is a giant arm wrestle between governing bodies, clubs, leagues, and players. Women simply don’t have an arm in that wrestle’ (Dodd cited in Crawford & McGowan, 2019, p. 256). This ‘insider–outsider’ perspective (Breen, 2007) then, provided Dodd with the vantage point to closely observe developments in governance and reform, be

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present for key meetings and events, and personally interact with the prime decisionmakers, advisers, and influencers. As a ‘FIFA insider who thinks like an outsider’ (Macur, 2016), and a ‘from-within revolutionary’ (Davis, 2016), Dodd also experienced these events through the lens of a newcomer who could critique and calibrate with other environments outside sport, including her experience in law and business as well as from the perspective of a former athlete who did not experience the spoils her male counterparts enjoyed. Dodd also had to navigate the uniquely challenging and complex world of FIFA. The representatives from more than two hundred disparate FIFA affiliated associations (recognised national football bodies) include powerful members of royal families, sporting icons, wealthy businesspeople, and allies of ruling governments. These multi-layered networks outside of football, are further complicated through alliances of language, culture, religion, geography, and history within the FIFA and Olympic movements. In addition, the social status created by holding a FIFA representative position, together with geo-political nuances, commercial relationships, and the passion for football, meant that the stakes were so much higher than in ‘normal’ work-place settings. Few people in ‘regular’ jobs are likely to say, as former Liverpool Football Club manager (coach) Bill Shankly is reported to have done, that ‘some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that’ (as cited in Bona, 2015).

The Method Behind the ‘Magic’ This chapter now presents vignettes of Dodd’s personal reflections of her experiences within her time at FIFA, her on-the-ground and hands-on experiences navigating the male-dominated space of world game governance, making strategic moves to drive change and capitalising on key moments to achieve goals for gender equality in football. It is in the process of writing, reflecting on the time and place, and the stakes, in this reflexive way that demonstrates the ‘how’ in some significant achievements and steps forward for women in football that were achieved during this time. Often when we report on or evaluate policy change in sport, standard practice is to focus on specific data, implementations, and outcomes. What we don’t see when reporting in this way, particularly when it comes to progressing women’s sport and championing for change for equality, is the agitating, the time biding, the networking, and the alliance building that occurs all through the process. By including the voice of the people on the ground, like Dodd, who have worked so granularly at micro levels to agitate for change, as well as operating strategically through visible platforms to champion change, it’s what we don’t see, and don’t think is valuable to include in policy change documentation that arguably holds so much value for us to learn from. We argue that these changes don’t happen by magic. Championing women in sport is by no means a fairy tale where wishes are easily granted. Change happens from the tireless work from relentless changemakers. Dodd embodies the title of the

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bestselling book on achieving success, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Duckworth, 2013). The following vignettes demonstrate Dodd’s processes, personal reflections and strategic planning. The vignettes are from sliding door moments during Dodd’s time at FIFA: from the corruption crisis of 2015 and the process which led to an overwhelmingly male group of FIFA members approving far more progressive gender equality provisions than previously could have been imagined only a year later. The details and specific processes of the policy and governance reform are not crucial to the understanding of this chapter, as we aim to present this in future work on the impact of the reform (see Beissel et al., 2023). What we highlight here, through including Dodd’s reflective writing, is the value of lived experience in the process of reporting. Dodd’s first-person reflections are presented in italics.

Vignette #1: The Creation of the FIFA’s Women’s Football Taskforce (WFT) In 2013, I was ‘co-opted’ to the Executive Committee for an initial 12-month period (FIFA, 2013). These additional co-opted roles had been proposed by Blatter, who wanted more than one woman at the table. This meant I could attend and speak at meetings, and receive the meeting papers, but had no right to vote. Recognising that the provision in the FIFA Statutes (FIFA, 2012, Art 30.5) which prevented more than one person from the same association from serving on the Executive Committee simultaneously meant that women from many of the geographic strongholds of women’s football had no prospect of gaining office, I actively sought out male and female changemakers and consulted widely with women in the game throughout the world who were not otherwise being represented through the male voting positions. My position was designated ‘Co-opted Member for Special Tasks’. The tasks were undefined, and there was no precedent for the roles. Moreover, the roles were created partway through FIFA’s four-year election cycle, so the additional women were joining an already-established administration and committee set-up. Instead, I looked for existing internal mechanisms to replicate, thereby attracting less opposition and, ideally, agreement. I determined that a ‘Taskforce’ structure could effectively enlarge the platform for promoting gender equity initiatives and sought high-level support by meeting directly with FIFA’s President. I was conscious that my opportunities to lead or influence would be limited. I had no vote on the Executive Committee. I did not chair any of the committees below it: their agendas were driven by others. However, I had observed the creation of the FIFA Task Force Against Racism and Discrimination in 2013 (FIFA, 2016), chaired by FIFA Executive Committee member and CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb. I decided to ask then-President Blatter if we could create a task force for women’s football, which could be a platform to lead on gender equality, and a forum for action

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in advancing women’s football. At the earliest opportunity, I met with Blatter and pressed my mission to improve conditions for women in football. I took printouts of photographs that my supporters had posted on social media, under the #Moya4FIFA hashtag during the campaign, to make visible the non-voting constituency who hoped and expected that I could make a difference. Blatter was an astute politician and could see the benefit to FIFA of acknowledging this constituency. I believe he also had a genuine interest in advancing women’s football. In late 2013, with the support of the FIFA President, the FIFA Women’s Football Task Force (WFT) was created by the Executive Committee, and I was appointed chair. It included members from every Confederation - mostly women with deep lived experience in the game - with club football expertise represented by Olympique Lyonnais. We met in early 2014 to identify and establish priorities for the development of women’s football (FIFA Media Release, 2014a). The first priority of the WFT was to draft the Development Principles (Women’s Football: 10 Key Development Principles (FIFA WFT, 2014)), which could be adopted globally as a blueprint to guide football’s leadership and help associations avoid the most common pitfalls (FIFA Media Release, 2014b).

Vignette #2: Approval of the WFT Proposals via the Women’s Football Symposium ‘Calls to Action’ Towards the end of each Women’s World Cup (every four years), FIFA had traditionally held a Women’s Football Symposium, where the member associations attended presentations and workshops over two to three days, culminating in watching the World Cup Final. In 2015, Canada was to host the 6th Women’s Football Symposium. It was also customary at each Symposium for there to be a declaration or ‘Call to Action’—a plea for some specified improvements for the women’s game—that would be read out by the FIFA President to the applause of the delegates, and which he would take to the Executive Committee for approval. Presumably influenced by the US Justice Department arrests and search warrants for bribery, racketeering, money laundering, and wire fraud executed against senior FIFA officials and executives in Switzerland, and simultaneously in other places around the world on 27 May 2015 (BBC, 2015; US DoJ, 2015), Blatter opted not to travel for the Symposium and final held in Vancouver on 5 July 2015 (PA Sport, 2015). Again, I seized on the opportunity this presented. As Blatter had indicated that he would not be in Canada, I wondered what Calls to Action might arise from the Symposium in his absence. Based on the Symposium agenda, I drafted three broad proposals to finalise with the FIFA administration. They agreed that they reflected the topics and spirited discussions of the Symposium. I spoke to as many participants as possible, asking that, if they agreed to the Calls,

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that they indicate their support through spirited applause when I read them out on the final day. As agreed, in the absence of the President, and as Chair of the WFT, I presented to the gathered delegates from 171 countries, who approved the Calls to Action by acclamation (FIFATV, 2015). Among other things, the Calls covered increased inclusion of women in decision-making and the resourcing of football at all levels without gender discrimination. With neat circularity, these Calls were then referred back to the WFT to advance through the reform process.

Vignette #3: ‘#womeninFIFA’ Media Campaign In August 2015, the FIFA Reform Committee was created in response to the imperative for reform that arose from the arrests and ‘FIFAgate’ corruption crisis. The Reform Committee was charged with developing reform proposals to be voted on by the FIFA Congress. I thought that this Reform Committee would be the best channel through which the WFT Calls to Action could be answered. As I looked at the various ideas that were proposed within FIFA (such as those from the Chair of the FIFA Audit and Compliance Committee (FIFA, 2015a, b) and externally), gender issues were starkly absent. Put simply, football’s gender balance was not recognised as either part of the problem, or part of the solution. In my view, it was both. With the support and assistance of the WFT and others, I prepared a submission on behalf of the WFT containing proposals reflecting the Calls to Action from the July 2015 Symposium. I submitted it to the FIFA Reform Committee, where it was presented by its only female member, Sarai Bareman (subsequently appointed as FIFA’s Chief Women’s Football Officer). (FIFA Women’s Football Taskforce, 2015) Lodging the submission to the Reform Committee was only the first step in making an impact. What followed was a global public campaign, executed alongside private discussions with those who were shaping and voting on the reforms. At my request, the WFT submission was made public on the FIFA website. This was enormously important. FIFA’s publication of a document authored by a FIFA official on behalf of a FIFA Task Force, gave it immediate status and global visibility. Together with a team of like-minded allies around the globe, we commenced a public campaign in support of the proposals. There were three main elements to raise awareness and influence the reform process: 1. Mainstream media: We alerted numerous journalists and amplified the submission using opinion pieces, for example, in The New York Times (Dodd, 2015), and Inside the Games by Olympic icon Donna de Varona (de Varona, 2015), and through interviews with prominent footballers (including World Cup winners and Olympic gold medallists Julie Foudy and Mary Harvey) and lawmakers and advisers (Bendery, 2015a; b).

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2. Digital and social media: The reform proposals gained widespread support, evidenced by use of the hashtag #womeninFIFA by the women’s football community and their allies. It was also supported by prominent sports figures ranging from Billie Jean King (Clarey, 2016) to Iranian football captain Masoud Shojaei (Dodd, 2016, February 5); plus an online petition organised by Athlete Ally with dozens of leading current and former Olympians and athletes from a range of sports (Gibson, 2015). UN Women tweeted my New York Times op-ed, and many NGOs including streetfootballworld, Human Rights Watch, FARE, Women Win, CAFE and Kick It Out issued statements of support. By the time the proposals were voted on, our hashtag #womeninFIFA had a reach of 47 million on Twitter (Glass, 2016). 3. Via FIFA: the FIFA administration conscripted me for its press conferences and media briefings (Australian Associated Press, 2015). I had not expected such a platform, but FIFA was under pressure to demonstrate its ‘victim’ status and willingness to reform. From my perspective, it was helpful that FIFA appropriated the WFT narrative on gender equality, because it amplified the message and dramatically increased the likelihood that our proposals would be included in some way in the reform package. In parallel with the public campaign, we engaged individually with as many of the decision-makers as possible to urge their support. We scoured conference and meeting schedules to see where key targets would be, and who they would be speaking with, then tracked down sympathetic influencers or media who would also be in attendance. Wherever the decision-makers went, we wanted them to be asked about the gender reform proposals and be invited to commit their support. The degree of support and collaboration across so many sectors, roles, and countries was truly staggering—and very heartening. The notion that ‘women do not support other women’ was generally untrue in my football experience, and utterly untrue in my experience of the reform process. Football is a team sport, and so many women and their allies willingly joined the team to fight for progress and reform.

Reflections on the Vignettes As set above, where football is situated within a sport context of having been developed by and for men (Hargreaves, 2002), and women have been excluded or restricted in their freedom to participate in any roles in sport, then another lever to shift the balance is required. A feminist approach, inspired by the work of Gilligan (1982), reframes gender equality efforts in sport by advocating for the creation of an environment focused on fairness, transparency, accountability, collaboration, diversity, and inclusion. Using this approach, it can be argued that a positive moral obligation applies where people in positions of influence and power are the beneficiaries of

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a system established and perpetuating historical and/or current inequities (racism, sexism, colonialism, slavery etc.). As is the case for sports organisations, such as FIFA, a higher moral duty is imposed on those beneficiaries to an unfair system to actively include members of the community who have been excluded, in this case women. Those persuaded by this positive moral obligation then may be influenced to create inclusive policies and programs to compensate for past inequalities. It could be expected that this would be translated into affirmative action measures, such as increased financial resources, pay parity, mentoring/training programs, access to facilities, equal broadcasting, prize money, and governance quotas, for example. While this approach intellectually and morally may be supported, there is little evidence to suggest that sport organisations, such as FIFA, have reformed on this basis. Carole Oglesby, a long-time campaigner and former co-chair of the IWG, observed that, ‘I don’t think organizations have seen the light, but they think: “Ok, this is something we have to do, to check the box”’ (cited in Wissgott, 2019). While there have always been some decision-makers open to a moral, and/or a feminist approach, or who believed it to be good business and a part of their duty to grow the game, there was evidently not a sufficient consensus to shift the status quo and drive significant structural change on gender-balance within FIFA prior to 2016. It is clear then, that nothing happens by magic. As detailed through the many conversations, strategic agitation, understanding of key networks, people, and positions that Dodd connected with and to, this ‘grit’ work of influence and advocacy is multilayered and messy. When we research how to drive change and report on the outcomes of change processes, we rarely reflect on the ‘messy’ at this micro level. By including the lived experiences and reflections of Dodd, a champion of change central to this particular process, those strategic alignments, moments of opportunity and influence and advocacy become visible, and if not replicated, provide inspiration and hope for the next generation.

Conclusion The sharing of lived experiences through reflective creative writing adds value to reporting of change in sports policy, particularly for women in sport. This approach not only adds women’s voices and the voices of those working directly with organisations to drive change to records how change is achieved. It also shows the power of storytelling, giving insight into the ‘how’ to inspire others who are passionate about this work but might feel isolated, frustrated and like they are failing when change isn’t achieved—fast enough or at all. As we highlight, altering the status quo doesn’t happen by magic. When we report on significant positive changes, we should be mindful of the narratives we tell alongside the wins. Explaining the steps, and missteps, along the way encourages others to seize the windows of opportunity and find allies. We have a responsibility as researchers to show the’how’ and to provide courage, ideas and tools to others.

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In this chapter we contend that Dodd is someone who has indeed lived a football life, as imagined by Shankly, in seeing football as having ability to change lives. Valuing its importance, understanding its power to drive change and having experienced varied inequalities on and off the field in football, as Dodd has, merits highlighting her unique voice and experience. This chapter demonstrates alternate ways to provide an evaluation of policy reform in sport governance that emphasises the strength of including lived experience. It serves to add to the nuanced understanding of how these steps to make change for women in sport occur by centring the voices of the women who are driving the change. We recommend scholars in the field of sports management consider including more voices, reflection, and lived experiences in work that seeks to report on the inclusion, celebration, and championing of marginalised communities in sport. Underscoring the voice of changemakers and making their voice central shows the detail of the actual work on the ground; work from which we can all learn from rather than only applauding the result. More recognition is needed for the work being done by those making the magic. Acknowledgements The authors thank Moya Dodd for her invaluable insights and contribution to this chapter. The authors also acknowledge the use of the autoethnographic material previously published in: Dodd, M., & Ordway, C. (2020). FIFA Governance: How Crisis Opened the Door for Gender Equality Reforms, Jean Monnet Working Paper Series 14/20, New York University School of Law, https://jeanmonnetprogram.org/paper/fifa-governance-how-crisis-opened-the-door-for-gen der-equality-reforms/

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Dr Catherine Ordway is Associate Professor (Sports Management) at the University of Canberra. She is a sports lawyer, has a Graduate Diploma in Investigations Management and her PhD was titled “Protecting Sports Integrity: Sport corruption risk management strategies”. Catherine edited Restoring Trust in Sport: Corruption Cases and Solutions (Routledge, 2021). Catherine is a Senior Fellow with The University of Melbourne Law School, an affiliated scholar with the Global Institute for Responsible Sport Organizations, and an Expert Consultant with Sports Integrity & Governance Partners. Catherine is a co-founder of Women on Boards (WOB), and Women in Sports Law (WiSL). Catherine Chairs the Badminton World Federation Vetting Panel and the World Curling Federation Anti-Doping Hearing Panel. She is a member of the International Cricket Council Independent Review Board and the Asia Racing Federation’s Anti-Illegal Betting Taskforce.

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Kasey Symons is a Research Fellow in the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia. Her work focusses on women in sport, fan culture, sport media and literature and sport and social impact. Kasey is also a sports writer and co-founder of the women in sport media platform, Siren Sport.