Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture

360 Pages·2010·1.75 MB·English

by  Andrei S. Markovits

GaminGt
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world
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how sports are reshaping
global politics and culture
GaminGT
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E
world
andrei s. Markovits & lars rensMann
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2010 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Markovits, Andrei S.
Gaming the world : how sports are reshaping global politics and culture /
Andrei S. Markovits and Lars Rensmann.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-691-13751-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Sports and globalization—Europe. 2. Sports and globalization—United
States. 3. Nationalism and sports—Europe. 4. Nationalism and sports—
United States. 5. Sports—Political aspects—Europe. 6. Sports—Political
aspects—United States. I. Rensmann, Lars. II. Title.
GV706.35.M3525 2010
306.483—dc22
2010006187
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data are available
This book has been composed in Janson and Bank Gothic
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
Kiki
Ina
Samira
and
Cleo Rose
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ix
chapter 1
Introduction: Going Global—Sports, Politics, and Identities 1
chapter 2
The Emergence of Global Arenas: Mapping the Globalization of Sports
Cultures between Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Localism 43
chapter 3
The Transatlantic Transfer of Sports and their Cultures:
Institutionalization and Diffusion 107
chapter 4
A Silent “Feminization” of Global Sports Cultures? Women as Soccer
Players in Europe and America 157
chapter 5
A Counter-Cosmopolitan Backlash? The Politics of Exclusion, Racism,
and Violence in European and American Sports Cultures 207
chapter 6
The Limits of Globalization: Local Identity and College Sports’
Uniquely American Symbiosis of Academics and Athletics 271
Conclusion 316
List of Acronyms 327
Index 331
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PrefaCe and aCknowledGments
t
his project started in June 2006 when Andrei Markovits, to his immense
delight, assumed the summer position of “Fußball-Professor” (soccer pro-
fessor) at the University of Dortmund when that city featured one of host
Germany’s most eminent venues of the World Cup soccer tournament.
Dortmund also happens to be Lars Rensmann’s place of birth and the
home of his parents. It was Markovits’s honor to meet Gerd Rensmann,
Lars’s father (now deceased), and one of Germany’s most renowned sports
journalists, before the two proceeded to the city’s famed Westfalenstadion,
home to Rensmann’s beloved Borussia, to watch Brazil defeat Ghana.
That fall, Rensmann commenced his position, co-sponsored by the
German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdi-
enst—DAAD) at the University of Michigan. We are very grateful to the
DAAD and the University of Michigan for giving us the institutional pos-
sibility to expand our friendship into a scholarly collaboration that both of
us enjoyed immensely. Our being colleagues at the same university led us
to coauthor a number of publications, not least a book on sports entitled
Querpass: Sport und Politik in Europa und den USA (Verlag Die Werkstatt,
2007). This book constitutes at best a distant sketch to our current work
and is in no way its German precursor, let alone equivalent. Above all,
being colleagues at the wonderful University of Michigan has provided us
many hours of priceless visits to the Big House to watch football, Yost
Arena to attend hockey games, Crisler Arena to witness a long-overdue
resurgence in Michigan basketball; and the professional sports’ offerings
in the Detroit metropolitan area, including our enjoying the Red Wings at
“the Joe,” the Pistons at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and the Tigers at Co-
merica Park. Alas, we have yet to attend a Lions game at Ford Field to-
gether. But we are certain that this will happen soon.
Permit us to say a few words about the sports terminology that informs
this book. As bicontinental sports fans, we know that our readers in Britain
would have preferred our using the word “supporters” instead of “fans.”
We are fully aware of the common language that divides us, none more
gravely than in the world of sports. We know that “pitch” has a different
meaning in Britain than it does in America. Since this book was coauthored