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All the field's a stage

Originally at http://www.shaunagm.net/blog/2014/02/all-the-fields-a-stage/

My good friend, a theater professor, is interested in sports as performance, but isn’t too familiar with most sports.  I collected the following links to send to her, and thought I’d share them here as well:

Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the Spectacles of Female Power and Pain by Sarah Marshall:

Judges could allow their scores to be influenced by a skater’s costume, or by a skater’s appearance, or simply by some ineffable quality that struck them, somehow, as “right”---right for the moment, right for the event, right for the sport. Many judges saw these qualities in Nancy. “She’s a lovely lady,” an Olympic judge, who preferred to remain anonymous, told sports writer Christine Brennan. “She was raised as a lady. We all notice that.”

(This response to the above article, On Femininity and Race in Figure Skating by Kendra James, is also well worth a read.)

Here’s a collection of links on the recent controversy over Richard Sherman, which showed yet again that the performance of masculinity in sports is different for black men than for white:

On grunting in women’s tennis, which has been described, variously, as “cheating” and “unladylike”:

On the subject of women’s tennis, I highly recommend Serena Williams Is Not a Costume by Jessica Luther, along with Luther’s two follow up articles and a number of other articles she cites.

And in men’s tennis, there’s the outsized personality of John McEnroe, the role of his angry outbursts in his popularity, and the question of how real his anger was: The Precise Moment of John McEnroe’s Fall From Greatness by David Zahl.

Moving on to basketball, there’s the official NBA video on flopping, complete with examples, as well as this highlight reel of LeBron James flopping on which, perfectly, there is a comment: “Is this basketball or theatre?”  (This is apparently called “diving” in soccer/non-American-football.)

I feel there must be tons of analysis of Dennis Rodman and his performances on and off the court. One can start with this.

My friend and I already had a YouTube party looking at touchdown celebrations, but maybe you haven’t yet.

And, finally, two great scenes from a League of Their Own (a fictionalized account of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League).  The first is probably more relevant, but the second is iconic: