body politic
Reviewed by Keith Cannon, Department of Communication, Wingate University
MARCH 10, 2006 archive
In the past, sports books like Body Politic have often been greeted with praise like the well-meaning but condescending "It's about more than sports." For author David Shields, that's a given. He figured out a long time ago that sports is about more than sports and the meditations in this book on sports, society, race, religion, gender, the media, you name it, are the proof.
It's hard to characterize exactly what Body Politic is "about," because its topics range from the cultural significance of broadcaster Howard Cosell and former NBA star Charles Barkley, to the meaning of failure - and tattoos - to athletes, to what sports movies are really trying to tell us. (Shields says it's all about religion.) But the unifying theme of this series of quirky but compelling essays seems to be this:
The Great American Sports Machine of the book's title, created and fed by fans and the media, is a reflection of who we are, or at least think we are as a people. In Shields' extended metaphor, the "endlessly complex dialectic between body and mind" defines us, for better or worse.
Shields unfolds this premise beginning with his own personal experiences as a high school basketball and tennis player idolizing ABC's Howard Cosell, the polarizing but energizing voice of "Monday Night Football."
The book also takes the reader into the psyche of Los Angeles Lakers' coach Phil Jackson, examines the fan experience at a Seattle Supersonics NBA game, and gets behind the image-making of Barkley, a supposedly outspoken, but ultimately "safe" because of possible political aspirations, commentator on race in sports.
Globalization and the melding - and clash - of cultures is here too. Shields further examines contemporary attitudes toward race in the contrast between the playing styles of African American and European players in the NBA. He also delves into the East-West divide in looking at the experiences of Japanese players Suzuki, the subject of a previous book by Shields, and Hideki Matsui on coming to the U.S. to play major league baseball.
Shields, an English professor at the University of Washington, displays a finely attuned ear to the rhetoric of sports-speak and the narrative of sports media. The best chapter in the book is "Words Can't Begin to Describe What I'm Feeling," a nine-page exorcism which throws every sports cliche in the book out the window. (But how could he miss "It is what it is"?)
And like good sports journalists do, Shields recognizes that the losers are better stories than the winners: "There's so little of the human predicament in their [the winners'] shiny glory." The proof is in the chapter which details the decline and fall of a variety of baseball players who had it, then lost it, in part because they began to overthink (ironic given baseball's traditional status as the thinking person's sport).
These disparate strands do manage to come together in a coherent whole, creating a book worth reading for everyone who ever dreamed of scoring the winning touchdown on Monday Night Football, or even - like this reviewer - just of describing it like Cosell did. It's also a good explanation of our national obsession with sports, especially if you can't understand why the foregoing would even be someone's dream.
David Shields. Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2004. 193 pp. (cloth). $23.00. ISBN 0-7432-4774-4.
Copyright © 2006 by Keith Cannon.