Sports as Sites of Learning & Contestation - A Conversation with Prof. Frank Andre Guridy

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

A kid whose classroom is not really a space where they're able to find themselves or feel a sense of impactfulness. It is absolutely true that the practice of what I would call embodied learning becomes very powerful, you know, and there is something about if the situation is right between the coach and player that becomes an educational exercise. And I think the parallels between that and what we do in the classroom are clear.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name is Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. We often overlook sports as a site of learning, but it's a massive part of so many people's lives, whether playing, supporting, watching, or teaching. And simultaneously, all of life happens in and around the sports arena. It's humanity in our most beautiful and sometimes ugliest manifestations. With all of the global sporting events happening right now, I wanted to bring this into our podcast conversations, and there are few people better to do that with than player, coach, friend, and also preeminent scholar of the history and political economy of sports around the world, Professor Frank Andre Guridi. Frank is the Dr. Kenneth and Caritha Ford Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies. He's also the professor of history and the executive director at the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. He's an award-winning historian whose research has focused on sports history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. And his most recent book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play, tells the story of the American stadium as an institution that has played a central role in American civic and political life and in the struggles for social justice from the 19th century until the present. You can find links in the show notes to Frank's other books and more of his fantastic work.

So, I mean, firstly, just so good to see you. Likewise. Just given all the stuff that's going on right now with the Men's World Cup and with the Knicks and with the French Open, which we've had the pleasure of going to together in Paris previously, and just all, you know, all of the sports events happening around the world, we've not really dug into that in the podcast before, so it really made me want to go there a bit, and you're just a perfect person to engage in some of that with. So yeah, perhaps it might be useful just for people to hear a little bit about where you, how did you come to this idea of kind of the entanglement of sports with life and history and politics, et cetera?

Yes. I think, you know, my interest in sport beyond its role in recreation and, and providing fun for people, you know, it starts with, like it does with a lot of people. So a biographical story, it's about my own, um, Coming of age in the 1970s and '80s in New York City and being the child of Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants, and certainly on my father, the Dominican side, baseball was a very important— American baseball was a very important point of identification. And it meant much more than just playing or watching games. It was sort of central to how Dominicans and other Caribbean peoples came to see themselves as— and not just as Americans, but literally in their own national cultures, given how popular the sport was Right. It still is in the Caribbean. And so my father just sort of passed that on to me. And I became one of those boys who played baseball when boys in inner cities played baseball in the 1970s and '80s. And I quickly learned that it had this larger cultural significance. It was much more than just seeing a game. It was about seeing, particularly at that time and still is the case in the United States, many Caribbean baseball players have a lot of visibility because of their success, their undeniable success. And so it gave me heroes to look up to. It gave me a model of what it meant to be a Caribbean or a Black or Dominican-Puerto Rican person at that time. So those were very foundational experiences for me growing up, particularly in a context when public education in New York City was in decline. I went to public schools and they were pretty decent until I got to high school when the experience was really alienating. And so I often say that I found myself on the pitcher's mound. I learned, yeah, I learned how to strike batters out if I could, but I learned about what it meant to be a man of color growing up in New York City in the 1970s and '80s and learning things like resilience, teamwork, and those sorts of things, and learning personhood. I mean, that's how central it was to me growing up. And then later on, fast forward, I became an academic historian. And after doing historical work on Cuba and Cuba's relationship to the United States and its connection to histories of slavery and empire, I decided, you know what, those foundational experiences, I want to bring them into my scholarly pedagogical work. And that's what I started doing around 2010. And that's what I've been doing since.

Yeah, I love it. So interesting. And I mean, just what you said there really resonates with kind of how I feel about education broadly in the sense of like sites of learning, like these places where we go to learn to be a person in the world with other people. Like that just doesn't happen in school, right? In this little white box that we set aside as the— and that opening up is such an important piece of what this podcast is about. And just the broader work is what are those other sites? And so, I mean, maybe that's a good place to go in terms of, yeah, how do you see sports playing a role in that kind of life learning, I suppose?

Yeah. I, you know, I think part of the thing, the interest in sport too, was it became an intellectual exercise. I mean, every sport is a field of specialization that requires you to have a certain kind of knowledge, right? But then I really got into the history of sport. You know, I, I was a bookish kid, hence I became a scholar later, and I would just go to the library and read everything I could about sports heroes and things like that, but also about the significance that the, that sports had in the freedom struggles of marginalized peoples. And in my case, as someone growing up in the United States, I learned pretty quickly in my teenage years and afterwards that sport had a significant role in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s, you know, when the United States is undergoing this massive political social change and when the sports world helped amplify those changes, help inspire those changes. And the person that is often cited in that period, of course, was the groundbreaking baseball player, multisport athlete Jackie Robinson, who breaks the color line in Major League Baseball in 1946 when he signs with the Dodgers and he plays his first game in the major leagues in 1947. And Robinson becomes a hero. I mean, he was hated certainly by segregationists in the South, but over time he becomes a national hero. And he embodies the aspirations of Black people. And I would say also of the generation of baby boomers who really were looking for something different. As the United States was going through the prosperity of the 1950s, and also the turmoil of the 1960s. And so Robinson, he certainly, and this is something we could talk about, gets taken up by the American government and is used for all sorts of purposes, his image, something he became aware of toward the end of his life, or he knew about it throughout his life, but certainly he was very bitter about that at the end of his life when he died too young at the age of 56. But at the same time, his ascendance and the ascendance of the Black athlete, the Black male athlete in particular, really became these emblems of a possibility for Americans and certainly for Black Americans. And this is something, so when I come of age in the '70s and '80s, that becomes part of the American national story. And it's something that I experienced growing up myself. And it's something that certainly by the time I'm growing up, we have prominent athletes in all the major American sports. I mean, we see parallel dynamics happening in Europe as well, I think France in particular. And so I think, so the sports world and the sport industry, which is something we can also talk about, becomes more prominent. In the world, becomes certainly more prominent in the United States, and it becomes an exemplar of American democracy and integration. And those were very powerful messages for Americans in that period. And I came of age in that context.

Yeah, interesting. And just curious, did you feel a disjunct? You said with public education and the kind of out of school, did your public education experience encourage you into those spaces, or is it something you had to just do outside of the school?

I kind of developed them on my own, to be honest with you. You know, because I think in the 1980s in New York, and I know this in retrospect now, it's not something I, you know, I was just living as a teenager.

Yeah, sure.

But certainly the anxieties associated with the war on drugs, crack cocaine, were very, very evident in New York and in American cities in general at that time. And that and other factors leads to the, you know, the decreased funding of public education.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

You know, hope for what education could be for as American cities were becoming more and more Black and brown. And so by the time I'm in high school, that dynamic is already in play where we see, you know, I had gone to integrated schools and my high school was less racially integrated. You know, more white teachers are disappearing, more of my white peer mates are disappearing, you know?

Right.

And so high school was an alienating experience 90% of the time for me. And so, yes, so sport became this place for me to kind of, as I said, find myself, educate myself, and find a sense of community and identification. Because my educational experience in the high school period was really alienating for the most part.

Yeah. And I wonder, there's something interesting for me around gender too, because, you know, we do this work with IB and Festival of Hope and with kind of young changemakers, amazing young people all over the world, but we definitely see a higher representation of young women, girls in that context. And I do sometimes wonder why is this not as much resonating with young men? And boys, and perhaps there's other places they're going for. And so I guess there's just an unformed question for me there around how, yeah, maybe those spaces are also partly proving grounds or development areas for young men, not solely, of course, like with the rise of women's sports, which is amazing, not to belittle that, but just to reflect on how it, yeah, where do young people find these spaces to grow and develop, right?

Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, because sports, certainly in the States, well, it deepens in my era, was very much a masculinist affair. Right. Like, so in the United States, the date that we often point to in terms of the catalyzing the transformation of sports and gender was the passage of the Educational Amendments Act of 1972. And of course, in particular, Title IX, which, you know, which was not legislation for sports, but it was about gender equality in higher education. And that suddenly became in the 1970s an arena where that provide the legal justifications, provide equality of opportunity for girls and women in sports. But when I was growing up in the '80s, like the Title IX revolution had not come to New York City, at least not my neighborhood. You know, it was very much a boys' affair. And actually to be a young woman at that time was really challenging. But I think, I do think, you know, certainly as a university professor, I've seen the, you know, the kind of the gender demographic shift. I mean, I, you know, history was a field that had been dominated by boys and men, and that is not the case anymore. That is not the case. The majority of my students are women. The majority of my best students are women most of the time.

Yeah.

And so there is a gender dynamic and there's been a lot of discussion about this in the United States. You know, why boys and men seemingly are not as engaged in the educational process as it, as it was before. And that's sort of beyond my expertise, but certainly sport remains one of those places that boys and men are, are able to sort of find some sort of, you know, connection, community, et cetera. But because of the Title IX revolution in the United States, it, it's also a place for women and otherwise defined people, whatever their gender background is. Yeah. Right.

Well, well, exactly.

Yeah.

And it's also that for me brings in then the role of the coach in the community, right? Because it's super interesting to me that like, again, the educationally in a broad sense, that role of the relationship between a teacher in inverted commas, a coach, a kind of mentor figure, and a young person or a person who wants to develop and grow in a particular area. And some of that is those relationships are strained in enforced environments like public schools or in schools where people feel that, you know, they haven't got a lot of agency or feel like they're kind of motivated or choosing to be there. But then that dynamic radically shifts when they choose to be in a tennis club or in a baseball club where they really want to grow and develop. And so suddenly you get this really, I think, generative potentially relationship between then the, the coach figure and the young people? So again, I know this is not necessarily your area of expertise, but it's kind of all packaged in with this whole, yeah, the kind of, I guess, the historical dynamics or the kind of entangled dynamics of sports in society, right?

Absolutely, Tim. You know, I, no, this is a great question because of those formative experiences that I had in sports. And you know, I had some bad coaches. I had coaches who were alcoholics. I had coaches who were not good, but I had one or two that I remember fondly to this day. And I feel like I take those lessons into the classroom. Absolutely. I see my role is almost like a coach, you know? And part of that is I had the experience of coaching my daughter's, um, softball team a couple of years ago.

Yeah. Yeah.

One of the most gratifying experiences of my life because, I mean, I was lucky. I think, you know, there are a lot of nefarious forces working against youth sports right now in the United States. It is the largest revenue generator in the sports world. Youth sports makes more money than the National Football League.

Wow.

Because of the ways it's turned into a total cash cow by private equity and other, and other private companies. And because of the fact, and this is an education story, because of the fact fans, parents are desperate to try to get their kids into college by getting athletic scholarship because of the exorbitant cost of higher education in the United States of America. Right? So, so there is all of this horribleness in the youth sports.

Yeah, sure.

Now the exploitative nature, the ways in which parents and kids are spending a lot of time traveling around the country playing sports with the idea that that's going to get them some sort of route to upper mobility somehow. And then of course there's all the well-known abuses that have been happening because most coaches in the United States are men and there's well-documented sexual assault harassment that come out. Certainly one of the cruel ironies of the post-Tina Lane era is that girls and women's sports were coached by women. And then once women's sports became more popular and potentially profitable, that industry is passed into the hands of men. So I mean, that created these—

Sure.

—gender hierarchies that are problematic. But even with all that, it is absolutely true that what coaching can give a kid who's not, you know, somehow the classroom is not really, you know, a space where they're able to find themselves or feel a sense of impactfulness. It, it is absolutely true that the practice of what I would call embodied learning becomes very powerful. And, and I experienced that as a coach. And it was, extremely gratifying. And I experienced that as a player, you know, and there is something about if the situation is right between the coach and player that can, you know, really be this special dynamic that, you know, that becomes an educational exercise. And I think parallels between that and what we do in the classroom are, are clear. And I take those sensibilities, you know, into the classroom, even in terms of thinking about teamwork and taking the classroom, making it— my job as a professor every semester is to try to make my classroom a community. Yeah, Peter. You know, where people are accountable to each other, where they feel like they have to participate in their learning. I'm not someone who lectures all the time. I'm someone who, you know, makes sure that students are engaging and participating and that they have the tools to do that, do it in a way that's generative and, and also, you know, respectfully. And those are all dynamics that, you know, coaches try to create their teams.

Exactly. I know. And it's just fascinating to me, like, where are all those spaces for young people in their lives? Like, yes, the classroom might be one of them. Let's hope. The sports field, the sports, you know, the locker room, the coaching could be another. And then maybe a religious organization, whatever, all these different spaces that, because sometimes for me, a lot of emphasis gets placed on the school as the site for all of those things. Like, yes, we want all of these literacy, numeracy, all of the kind of skills and knowledge development, but we also want character development and we also want social-emotional development. And all these things get kind of lumped into the school. And it's like, actually, you know, it takes a village, right? It's a whole kind of that, that idea that the educational process is a hugely wide boundary thing that involves building and being in community, wherever that community might be, hopefully within a spirit of kind of, as you said, like learning and collaboration. Yeah.

And, and, and different types of learning, you know, intellectual bookish learning that, you know, kind of embodied, you know, kinesthetic learning. And I think that that, you know, we see this in the arts, we see this with dance, you know, my, my partner's an enormous scholar. So we talked a lot about this with respect to, yeah, it's in the performing arts. But for me, I guess, you know, and this conversation is just triggering something I guess I've just internalized, which is that, you know, sport was a space of learning for me, bookish learning and body learning. And I've been really fortunate over the last, you know, the course of the last 16 years to be able to bring this into my, my pedagogy and my scholarship. Amazing.

Ah, brilliant. And it's maybe let's then go into a little more of that kind of site of civic engagement, because that's another piece that I think is super interesting, where sometimes sports gets overlooked as a site of struggle, as a site of change, societal change, like this podcast and many other things happening now are really kind of questioning what are the kinds of institutions that we need right now, because maybe the legacy institutions have been challenging and dysfunctional in all sorts of ways, and violent in some ways, right? So what, I don't know whether the LA Olympics coming up in a couple of years maybe is a nice way in, 'cause I've heard you talk about the 1984 LA Olympics as an interesting example of where sports comes into that. But yeah, just, yeah, perhaps we can open that up. Absolutely.

You know, what we saw during the course of the 20th century is in the US, but around the world, and the Olympics is a great example of this, is the growth of the sport industry. The sport business, right? Right. Centered around, in the case of the Olympics, the every 4 years mega sporting event. Same thing with the World Cup, which starts in 1930. And then the national versions of these, whether it's whatever the champions of the Premier League championship or the World Series or the Super Bowl become popular events, but become, they become very important politically because governments figure out as these industries and these sports become more popular, that that's a built-in audience for their political agendas. And so, right, whether it's Mussolini in 1934, the Second World Cup is happening in Mussolini's Italy in 1934, right? The 1936 Olympics is happening in Berlin, Nazi Germany, right? So, and those are clear cases among many other examples in Trump's America where governments use the mega sporting event to push their agenda. For sure. And these cases, this is a right-wing fascistic agendas, but then You know, we see this happening with, with all sorts of political, you know, politicians of different political backgrounds. So part of what people think when they think about the political function of sport is, is the kind of the bread and circus effect, right? Which is essentially it creates a compliant audience that governments then take advantage of and sportwash, as people would call it today, to push an authoritarian or whatever the agenda is. It doesn't have to be authoritarian, but it is also true because as the industry grew to rely more and more on the labor of marginalized peoples, whether they're immigrants in the European context or the American context or Black folks, and then another marginalized people racialized in the United States, and then women in the post-1970s period, sport becomes this arena of contestation. And if I use the Olympics again, of course, we see in 1968 when the Black American track stars, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raised their fists during the national— playing the national anthem after they win the silver and gold medals in 1968 in the Olympic Games in Mexico City. That's a moment when the Black freedom movement is announcing to the world that it's there and it's desiring freedom. And that becomes an iconic event. Of course, they paid the price for that political stance that they took. So sport works in multiple ways. It could work in the interest of elites, but could also work in the interest of the marginalized and the dispossessed. And that's what we've seen throughout history. And because the industry has grown, the visibility of these athletes have grown and grown and grown, that by definition makes sports, professional spectator sports and collegiate in the case of the United States, arenas of contestation and arenas to amplify interest. And that interest could be elite interest, it could be government interest, it could be the interest of white supremacists, but it could also be the interest of people who are fighting for freedom. And I think we've seen that over and over again in the US, but also here in France. I mean, the classic case, of course, is the 1998 World Cup when France wins its first World Cup and it creates this moment of explosion of energy, of a vision of a multicultural France that, you know, had existed before, but the World Cup victory kind of brings it up. We see something similar again in New York with the Knicks triumph recently. Yeah, very recently. Yeah.

No, it's so interesting, isn't it? And, and it was also like in an attention economy, it's like one of the places that gets the most eyeballs. I mean, to put it crudely, right? Like it's, it's, there is so much attention placed on so many people watching the World Cup games right now. So many people were, you know, engaged with the Knicks triumph. It's like there's just a, a place where people really want to invest their attention because they're just engaged with the competition. It's super engaging. It's super exciting, right? It is.

And I think a skeptic would say, well, it can facilitate a kind of tribalist kind of approach, winning, losing, and it can. Yeah. I think people who are not— miss out on the community formation that sport brings. Certainly people want their teams to win, of course. But— Yeah, that's true. The World Cup, people in England definitely want the English team to win, right? Or the French. For sure, that's there.

It's not just that. No, no, true. But the other thing I was thinking was that, you know, the whole taking the knee example is to your point about it's not just elite sports because then social media allows a visibility of community-based sports, young people taking the knee, like people, it creates an environment in which people are taking political stands or, you know, just making a statement for things they believe in, for justice or whatever, in a way that they perhaps couldn't have done before, right? Because people, I don't know, it wasn't as visible somehow. Yeah.

I mean, I think I, you know, this is a historian talking now. I mean, certainly social media does that and the smartphone and the instantaneous way that people can see something for sure. But radio did that. Newspapers did that. Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Louis Beats Max Schmeling, the German boxer in 1938. You know, people are listening to that on radio and people are spilling out in the streets of Harlem and elsewhere. Celebrate with triumph, with ratings. Television does the same exact thing in the 1960s and '70s. Right. And so now sport, you know, social media is doing the same sort of thing. I mean, and again, that's why it's always important to kind of link these questions to technology and the economy, the political economy of the industry, because, you know, these industries, you know, were created for the purpose of profit, you know, more often than not. But, but their effects are not just, just something you see in the wins and losses and the profit margins of professional or collegiate sports teams or leagues, you know? And I think that, but it is true, there's an instantaneous element now that social media gives us in the smartphone that, you know, that, you know, creates a more, a quicker kind of connection that can happen. But those technologies have been doing that for a long time.

Yeah. It's interesting though, isn't it? Because I guess it also works in the, in the opposite way of the, with the business interests and the profit incentives. Yeah. I mean, people like Michael Jordan, right? Who were, had such a platform, right, had such visibility globally, like one of the most famous people on the planet, right, at a certain point, could have used that platform in a really active way. And I'm not quite sure, but could— maybe didn't. Maybe, let's say that. I don't know. He didn't.

And not certainly not for any sort of political or social cause. No, sure. No, no, he didn't. And, and, and most athletes don't, because in the end, hey, most athletes just want to do their job. Or they want to be famous or they want to sell sneakers or whatever the merch is, as the young people say now. But I think, again, Howard Bryant, which is— he's a very astute, excellent historian journalist who's written a number of books about race and sport in America. He has this great book that came out in 2018 in the Kaepernick moment in the United States. It's called The Heritage. And what he argues is that regardless of the political persuasion of the Black athlete, they have to deal with this question because of the ongoing oppression of Black people. Once you become a visible Black celebrity, you know, you can't avoid the question of equality. You can try, but it's going to get foisted on you even if you have no interest in engaging in any sort of political discussion. And we saw that in the 2010s when, of course, the Movement for Black Lives, you know, was pushing, you know, obviously for the end of police violence against Black people. And it pushes athletes, you know, Colin Kaepernick and others like Megan Rapinoe, the white American queer lesbian superstar, among many others, to take a stand because they felt like they had to. You know, they couldn't avoid that question because of the hypervisibility of these athletes. You know, it creates a dynamic where they have to wrestle with it. I mean, it's interesting now in the Trumpian era where, you know, most athletes are not dealing with this. You know, they're really trying to avoid this because of the authoritarian political culture that we're sort of dealing with in the United States. Though in the Winter Olympics, it was very clear when Minneapolis was happening and when ICE was shooting people in broad daylight, you know, that, you know, even nonpolitical athletes who were associated with the American Winter Olympic team, you know, felt like they had to say something. Something. Right. And that's because of the hypervisibility of the mega sporting event and of the sports industry. Yeah.

It's tricky, isn't it? Because I, yeah, it all, it makes me wonder if it's e— it's somehow an unfair expectation in a way. Right. It's a burden, an additional burden. Yeah, it is.

It absolutely, it is. And, and because again, I mean, like, you know, most athletes just wanna, they just wanna perfect their craft.

It's true.

But they also know that if you wanna be famous, then, you know, this comes with the territory. And I mean, it is interesting to see how athletes are managing that.— and we talked about media earlier— in the era of social media where they're able to kind of take a lot more control over their image now than they did when they were really beholden to the print and electronic sport journalists. Whereas now they really can create messages that are more carefully crafted, you know, than had existed before. So, but it is, it is a burden. It absolutely is. But it comes with the territory.

Yeah, but I've also heard you talk about, I mean, this is taking us down that rabbit hole a bit, but in the business world, I've also heard you talk about the fact that then big brands like Nike start using the more political messaging. It's almost, are they co-opting it as a sales pitch or are they genuinely making statements about fighting for justice and equity? I don't know.

No, no, that's a great question, Tim. I think the answer is co-opt. You know, I think, I mean, I, I know there are sincere people in the corporate world who probably felt like when, for example, made the Nike ad with Colin Kaepernick in 2018, I think that was, that they saw that as a, you know, like really something important. I mean, I, but I think what's in looking back at that period, which is only 10 years ago, and then to see how corporate America like switched it quickly once Trump gets elected, you know, not just the first time, but the second time and how they abandoned anything that associated with what they call DEI or any diversity sort of, or political messaging, you know, was totally back to You know, corporate America backed away from that completely, you know? So in the realm of the sport business, you know, Nike will still associate itself with prominent Black athletes and not just Nike, many corporations. But in terms of connecting that to some sort of message of social justice, that they're not doing that now. More often than not, they're not. And so they backed away completely. And, and so that, you know, the 2010s feels like a quaint moment of yesteryear given what's happened since, you know, Trump has won office. Yeah. Right.

Sad to say. But the, the other, part of it, I suppose for me is like, you know, working more internationally is this whole question of the kind of, I mean, you mentioned the tribalism, right? But also the kind of the nationalism that comes in and this balance with events like the World Cup or particularly more so I would say in the Olympics, how, you know, balancing this kind of global community idea of fair competition and kind of commitment to excellence and these kinds of things. But with this spirit of whatever you would call it, gentle but committed competition between people, but we're actually all one, we're all similar, we're all one planet, one global community versus this kind of, I want my team to win. And I, you know, this kind of digging into the nationalism and the tribalism. And it's an interesting dance that happens, right?

Dance is the way to put it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because I mean, you know, and I'm wondering critique the Olympic movement and the World Cup all the time. That's my job in part. But I mean, there's no question that Pierre de Coubertin's vision, he was a French aristocrat who was not thinking about marginalized people at all, but his vision of the Olympic was about some sort of community that can be created through international competition. Jules Rimet had a similar vision when the World Cup is created in 1930. He's someone who experienced the brutal violence of the First World War and he thought sport, And football in particular, soccer as we call it in the United States, could be this arena of community formation. And to some extent they were right. They were right. Even as narrow as their vision was, Eurocentric as their vision was, they weren't wrong about that. And I think, and just look at what's happening with the World Cup now in the United States. I mean, the FIFA's corruption is so well documented, it's abhorrent. The ways in which they charge so much for tickets, the ways in which they have come completely complicit with the Trump regime. Xenophobic nationalism that we see happening in the United States and elsewhere. And yet just by the simple fact that people from different parts of the world are gathering in a space, it creates these organic and sometimes orchestrated community moments that can demonstrate visions of the nation. I think we see this at many World Cup events, but then also people are gathering around in sports bars. I mean, even if they can't afford a ticket, which most people can't, they can still find other ways to engage, watch parties. And not just in the—

I'm using the US.

'cause that's the case I know best. But again, we've seen this in other cities throughout the world that have hosted these events. So even if they are doing their work, the work of sportwashing, as the sports critic and historian Jules Boykoff and others calls, nonetheless, not all of it can be reducible to a corporate profit-making agenda. And I think it is interesting to see how the World Cup, which is arguably the largest, along with the Olympics, sport event, bring people together in a moment in the United States when we're experiencing xenophobic nationalism in historic levels.

Yeah, it's almost ironic in a way that at the local level it brings communities together. I mean, as we were saying earlier, of difference, of diverse and opposing perspectives, but there's some strange unity that happens for a moment. And maybe, you know, maybe there's some things that get seeded there that like, okay, we're maybe not as different as maybe— I mean, that's probably a naive thing to say, but there is something of that going on. I mean, you see it in all the countries when the people are getting together to support their national team and the national transcends, hopefully for a moment, the local tribal.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, and I think we've, that, that's undeniable. And, and I think again, I mean, part of the reason why I love working on sports, thinking about it, playing it when I can, is there's always this, there's a possibility of the unexpected, you know? And you know, that can happen in the context of a game. That can happen in the stands, you know, it can happen in all sorts of moments. So even as carefully crafted and orchestrated these big mega events can be, yeah, there's all sorts of things that happen inside them and around them that really can't be reduced to a certain agenda. And I think that, I mean, that's just what happens when you bring tens of thousands of people around, you know, to watch spectacular performance happen, you know?

Absolutely. But, but there's also something like incredibly timeless and ancient that happens in those micro-interactions of the sports people in competition, right? Like I was watching some games last night and you're just like, there is so much commitment, right? To winning to an extent, right? But winning in a spirit of like deep commitment to competition in the moment, but in a context of— it's really hard to explain it. This whole environment is asking me to give everything and be as good as I can possibly be, not because these other people are the enemy, but because that's what is being asked of me. And there's something really timeless and ancient about that, watching people in that spirit of competition, but then also to see them shake hands and hug and discuss and share after the game because they realize that moment required that thing. And the, you know, the referee's whistle has blown and now we're in a different moment and it requires something else. And I don't know, there's something really interesting about that. To me. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And I mean, that happens among the athletes on the pitch or on the court, but I think that also can happen among fans. I mean, they're just undergoing their ritual. They might don the country's colors or whatever their team colors are, and they may cheer on, they may boo and yell at the other people. And then sometimes, yes, that those divisions persist after the people leave the stadium. But oftentimes there is a kind of commonality like, hey, we're invested and we enjoy this enterprise. And that's kind of an interesting moments of mutual recognition that can happen even among spectators. And with football in particular, given, I mean, you know, the World Cup is not in the knockout round yet, or it will be soon, but you know, with these draws and stuff, I mean, like it, you know, like people will talk about a World Cup goal that an African team or Haitian team, for example, got. And, you know, like, and, and, and these teams might not have won the World Cup because more often than not European teams win the World Cup. But nonetheless, those are powerful memories for people. You know, when such and such scored a goal or when we drew, like what we see with Cape Verde. I mean, they've been able to do very well, you know, just by having draws against stronger competition and like that. That's not a winning-losing thing. That's about representing yourself, representing your country, representing your people, representing your aspirations. And I think that's exactly— we can see that in an event like the World Cup.

Yeah, it's true. I still remember when Cameroon had an amazing run in the World Cup in 1990, whatever. But I mean, the other side of that which I mean, I grew up in the kind of 1980s UK with rife hooliganism, right? Football, soccer, football hooliganism. And that to me is one of the ugliest sides of sports. I mean, it's, yeah, we don't need to go down that, but just to name it, like it is also brings out a really nasty side of some people. And that to me was just, yeah, that was really formative in my life of just seeing how what could be this incredibly generative space can get used as just this hideous space of violence and—

Can and does. And does. So many teams, you know, I mean, this is totally relevant to a European soccer football conversation about, you know, just the ongoing, you know, stubborn persistence of racism in European soccer leagues. It's just astonishing how it just, you know, continues. And because of this history of not just hooliganism, but of right-wing politics and right-wing-oriented fan cultures. And we see that over and over again, you know, and it's, it's been an ongoing dynamic in European soccer and soccer in Latin America and other other parts of the world as well. Absolutely. Yeah, no, I mean, and that's part of the deal because the stadium is a space of formation, but it can also be a space of danger and unruliness. And we see both throughout the history of sports in these facilities for sure.

And it's fickle, right? There's something very fickle about it. Just because I was, again, watching the England-Ghana game at one point with the substitutes there, I don't know, 95% of the England team were people of color, right? Yes. And when things are going really well, they're heroes, right? Yeah. But then as soon as they miss some penalties, like happened previously, right? The, the, just the horrendous racism, the turn that happens is like, it's so ugly and such a shame. Yes.

Because of the fact that even as hypervisible and sometimes rich as these athletes are who are coming from marginalized backgrounds, whether it's the United States or Europe, there's this sense of that among certain sporting publics and fans that they should be grateful that they're there, you know, that they, they're in this constant space of having to demonstrate their gratitude to the fact that they have the privilege of somehow playing when in fact they're on the pitch because they've been working hard and they deserve to be there, you know, and they succeed and fail like any other athlete. But you're right. I mean, there's so much at stake when things go wrong. And when they go right, there's a lot at stake. And then like we see in 1998 and maybe 2018 here in France, but, but then things can go wrong. It does provide the space for, for, you know, again, for kind of resentful, tribalistic, xenophobic sorts of politics and, and social dynamics. Yeah.

Yeah. Interesting. I mean, I kind of don't want to end the conversation on such a, such a downer, right? Like all the ugly parts of human manifestation. But, but, you know, there's some glorious things as well that do happen in sports. And, you know, just as you were saying, there are these young people who find in sports just a, not a level playing field, let's be clear, but an opportunity, a space for working hard and doing well, you know, this kind of myth of meritocracy that gets banded around in many spaces, education being a primary one. Which it's not true. It is a myth, but there is a sense that in sports there is opportunity for people who have talent, work hard, are committed. I mean, you know, the kind of King Richard, you know, the Venus Serena story, the movie mythologized, or I don't know how accurate it is to real life, but there is a sense that really giving it a lot and, and working hard, and then there is possibility there. I mean, it's a site of learning, a site of like possibility, but it's—

and that possibility could be you become an iconic athlete like Venus and Serena, or that could be like, I, I just— I'm having substantial connection with other people, and that carries you through other arenas of life. And I think that, you know, it's understandable we focus on the prominent athletes, but at the same time, you know, sport is— sporting practice happens at multiple levels, uh, the youth and the high school level, you know, whatever. Let me say whatever it is. And again, going back to where we started, I think that that's what it was for me. It was, you know, I didn't become a professional athlete or even a really good one, but certainly, you know, that those experiences were foundational. And I think that as educators, that's what we want for our students, you know? Yeah. And I think that, you know, I, one of the things I love about teaching this is that I love it when a student says, oh, I, I don't like sports. I hate it. I'm like, come on down, come to my class because I don't need you to like it, but I can get you to appreciate what's going on. Yeah. Yeah. And that is like the most delicious pedagogical challenge. Bring the kid who thinks this is, or the student who thinks this is really meaningless, whatever. And it's like, yeah, no, this, there's all sorts of ways in which this arena becomes an interesting space to learn a bunch of things. You know, economy, politics, society, et cetera. And I think that, you know, so those who are educators out there, I, you know, I really urge them to really consider using these, this arena as a way to teach and to engage with our students. Because I, I do think because of the hypervisibility of the sport industry, it is something that, you know, many young people, even if they're not sports fans, they are aware of it because it's just so in the air. It's impossible.

Exactly. Oh, amazing. No, thank you, man. It's so interesting. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about it. And, uh, no, just huge pleasure.

Thank you. Well, thank you, Tim. No, no, this is great. And this is the conversation really allowed me to think more deeply about, you know, what I'm doing and why I do it. So thank you.

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