body politic
Reviewed by Mark Bresnan, University of Iowa
AUGUST 8, 2008 archive
"The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it," writes David Shields in the epilogue to the set of loosely-connected essays that comprise Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (185). Shields, a creative writing professor at the University of Washington, defines "we" broadly, considering not only how American culture reads the athletic body but also how athletes interpret and present themselves. This second question fuels the most nuanced and compelling chapters in Body Politic: those that focus on singular figures, including Howard Cosell, Ichiro, Phil Jackson, Charles Barkley, Seattle SuperSonics owner Howard Schultz, Hideki Matsui, and collegiate hoopster Loree Payne.
Originally published by Simon and Schuster in 2004, Bison Books' paperback edition brings Body Politic back into print just as several of Shields' subject are re-entering the spotlight, demonstrating how quickly sports figures can transform themselves for both good and ill. As the SuperSonics move to Oklahoma City, we read Schultz's enthusiasm with even more ironic detachment than does Shields, who titles his essay on the Seattle owner "Fairy Tale of Reinvention and Escape." Now that Rick Ankiel has established himself as a legitimate presence in the Cardinal outfield, Shield's account of his breakdown in 2000 ("Bring the Pain") reminds us of how incredibly unlikely his success has been. These transformations are as much a tribute to Shields' choice of subjects as they are a product of serendipity. Amid the clutter of a sports culture that pays more attention to rhetoric and hype than it does to the events of the games th emselves, Shields has selected a fascinating set of subjects worthy of both reading and re-reading.
Body Politic takes seriously the relationship between sports and American culture at large, and Shields' references to literature, psychology and social theory are both compelling and gracefully incorporated. He accomplishes the rare feat of making Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon and David Mamet seem relevant to our understanding of ESPN, the New York Knicks and Michael Jordan. Less successful, however, are his attempts at experimental form, including the fragmentary epilogue "42 Tattoos" and "Words Can't Begin to Describe What I'm Feeling," a compilation of sports clichés as familiar as the overused phrases it employs. In essays without a central figure on which to build his analysis, Shields too often resorts to unsupported non sequiturs: "It's also nearly unheard of for a black athlete to suffer from the yips," he claims. "Absent other pressures, other oppressions, white men have a tendency to oppress themselves by overthinking" (156). Whether intended as provocation or earnest explanation, such armchair psychology doesn't rise to the razor-sharp level of Shields' other cultural critiques.
Despite these missteps, Body Politic proves that Shields has lost neither the candor nor the courage he exhibited in Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999), an unflinching and rigorously self-aware look at the relationship between the Seattle SuperSonics and their fan base. Here, this daring manifests itself not in his rather perfunctory essay on the connections between race and geography that animate professional sports ("Myths of Place") but in his unsparing portrait of Payne ("Being Random is the Key to Life"). A senior on the University of Washington basketball team who "always seems to say the correct thing and do what she's supposed to do, as if she were perpetually running for election," Payne is an accomplished student, a devout Christian, and an aspiring coach (167). When the Huskies play on after teammate Kayla Burt discovers a life-threatening heart irregularity, several national new outlets package the story as a heart-warming triumph, sympathetically highlighting Payne as the team's fearless leader in the face of adversity. Shields has no use for such an anodyne narrative: "For all her reported selflessness off the court . . . on the court she seems to be quite self-centered. This doesn't make her a hypocrite or a bad person. It just makes her a person: full of the contradictions, confusions, internal dramas, and mysteries that anyone else has and that she has trouble accepting about herself" (172). Acknowledging his subject's inherent pathos without stopping there, Shields turns what could have been an exercise in sentimentality into an elegant meditation on both the de-humanizing aspects of sport and the balance between order and chaos. In similar fashion, his essays on Barkley ("History of America, #34) and Cosell ("The Wound and the Bow: A Long Prologue") offer fresh perspective on two of America's most over-exposed sports figures. For readers weary of the stock narratives that dominate popular sports journalism, Shields' conviction that all athletic events generate multiple meanings makes Body Politic a refreshing and fascinating book.
Shields, David. Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007. x + 193 pp. $16.95 paper.
Copyright © 2008 by Mark Bresnan.