Final Reflections

Final Reflections

When the class stared I did not think there was much involved in sports culture in our country.  I always thought of sports as something younger kids play and what you watch on television.  I learned that sporting culture is more complex that I had anticipated.  It involves a few issues that I did not think about in the past.  These issues include racial diversity, sexual exploitation of the body, use of performance enhancing drugs, violence in sports, and handicapped athletes.  This list is rather short but I feel like these are the main issues that we covered in the course.  I am glad that I took this course because I feel like I learned a lot more than I thought that I was going to.   

"Why the 'Mans Mans' Game is an Insult to Men"

            I would not consider sport to be a safe place for LGBT individuals.  There are a few reasons that this is true.  The first reason is that our culture, mainly because of the media, makes too big of a deal about LGBT athletes.  There is absolutely no reason why LGBT people should be excluded from sports.  Even the most right wing conservatives would be hard pressed to come up with an explanation.

            Just this morning when I turned on the television to sports center, I was confronted with the recent news that yet another athlete has come out to be openly gay.  This story involved a college athlete that plays basketball at University of Massachusetts.  I am not surprised that it is difficult for athletes to come out of the closet and admit that they are openly gay to their family and teammates.  However, I am surprised that a college athlete was mature enough to tell the people around him that he is gay.  I would expect this from a professional athlete, but I am impressed that this college athlete had the courage to come out. 

            The NFL is even having the same “issue” with athletes that are open gay.  I feel like this is only an issue because the media and professional sports organizations are making it an issue.  Personally, I don’t care what sexual orientation the athletes have that I watch on television.  It’s really too bad that the media, professional sports organizations, and American culture as a whole is homophobic and obsessed with violence.   

Sports & Ethnicity

In the documentary, Hoop Dreams, we watch the struggles of two African American boys in the inner city of Chicago.  William Gates and Arthur Agee are striving to play basketball at a college level, but run into a number of issues ranging from inequalities in the high school education system to the gap between classes and their respective socioeconomic status.

This documentary raises a number of issues that include race, class, and values in our society.  In the documentary, we find out that Gates and Agee have been recruited by St. Joseph High School to play on their high school basketball program.  St. Joseph is a predominantly white high school with a respected basketball program.  For Gates and Agee, the social environment at St. Joseph High School was foreign to them.  These inner city neighborhoods in Chicago that Gates and Agee were raised in are completely different from the suburban environment that the St. Joseph High School students are accustomed to.  On a daily basis, Gates and Agee had to travel close to an hour and a half to get to their high school.  It is not hard to imagine how Gates and Agee could feel like social outcasts at a high school that is so much different than the inner city lifestyle that they are used to.

White Men Can’t Jump is another film that covers basically the same issues as Hoop Dreams, some of which are regarding race, class, and economic status in American Culture.   I think that these movies are trying to point out that there are some fundamental issues concerning race, class, and economic status that need to be dealt with.

           

Sports Pages: Gender in Advertising

        Many of the advertisements that we see today on television, magazines, or the internet include some type of message about gender.  The advertisement that we are going to take a look at today is for flipflopshops.com, which is a sandals and shoes retail website.  The ad is featuring Erica Hosseini, who is a professional surfer from Newport Beach, California.  I’m a huge fan of Erica’s because I’m also from Newport, I think she is a great surfer, and she is extremely attractive.    

The online advertisement for flip flops contains a few gendered roles that are interesting.  Usually, when there is an advertisement featuring an attractive woman, the demographic that is being targeted would most likely be males.  I would assume that this advertisement is targeting a female demographic, being that it is an online fasion website.  I do not think the potential customers that would visit this website views this advertisement as an objectification of the body.  Instead, I think the potential customers at this website view her as an athlete and have respect for her achievements.  In this case, it is not the content of the advertisement that determines the appropriateness.  This time it is the perception of the advertisements that differentiates Erica’s advertisement from the stereotypical advertisements that portrays the female body as a sexual object.  

There are consequences that result from advertisements that are considered by some people to be an objectification of the body.  Over time, young people will become desensitized to these types of advertisements and will eventually accept them as normal.  In an article from the Huffington Post, Warren J Blumenfeld writes about gender roles in the media.  He believes that the education system can teach younger people to interpret these advertisements in the correct way.  “Not only must our schools help equip students with communication literacy skills, but also they must actively teach skills of media literacy to empower students in deconstructing, analyzing, and reflecting upon the media images and messages that bombard them like atmospheric microwaves on a daily basis.”(HuffingtonPost)  An early understanding for young people will have an impact on the advertisements that we see in the future.

http://www.flipflopshops.com/images/201206_Erica.JPG

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-j-blumenfeld/examining-medias-socializ_b_3721982.html

The Sports Media Complex

The media refers to any means of public communication such as printed media and electronic media.  This includes newspapers, magazines, television, and the internet.  The primary source of public communication is currently television, but recently the internet is becoming a more frequently used media source.  

The media as a whole is responsible for the increase in revenue that the sports industry has seen in the recent past.  The media has also had an influence on the popularity of sports viewers.  The most profitable sporting events are televised, while sporting events that receive a smaller amount of viewers are rarely seen in media coverage.  

The location of major sports franchises are connected to the profitability of the city’s market and whether media coverage will be sustainable in the respective city.  The media plays a major role in sports.

Retired Athletes

Professional athletes have a very different career structure than the rest of the working world.  The fact that athletes are highly paid but usually only for a short time brings up some issues that the common worker does not usually have to deal with.  At the top of the list is the punishing physical trauma that professional athletes are forced to deal with for the majority of their career.  Also, professional athletes are paid a considerable amount of money for a relatively short time which leads to financial problems after their short-lived career comes to an abrupt end.  Players become used to an expensive lifestyle that is supported by a high paying salary.  When their career comes to an end, some players have a hard time transitioning to a more normal budget.  Bankruptcy is all too common for players that can no longer afford to live the way they became used to when they received large sums of money when they were in their athletic prime.

  For a professional athlete, the transition period between their sports career and retired life can be hard to overcome.  Some athletes find it hard to move past the time when their whole life was dedicated to their respective sport and have trouble finding a new way to spend their time.  Adjusting to a “normal life” is difficult after spending, in some cases decades, focusing all of their attention to sporting events and sport related travel.   

A far worse consequence of having a professional sports career is the permanent personal injury that some athletes face, especially those in the NFL.  Football players commonly suffer head trauma, such as concussions, that pose a long term threat for mental health.  Dementia is one of the many consequences of this repeated physical injury that has been documented by retired football players.  There have been a number of suicide attempts, both successful and unsuccessful, that have been accredited to these head injuries, mainly concussions. 

Blood in the Water

The “Blood in the Water” polo match took place on December 6, 1956 at the olympic games in Melbourne.  The water polo match was during the time of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.  Hungary went on to defeat the USSR 4 to 0, which only added to the tension of the political situation that was unfolding.

The match was named “Blood in the Water” because of a Hungarian player named Ervin Zádor.  During the last two minutes of the game, he come out of the water with a bloody eye after being punched by Soviet player Valentin Prokopov.

Prokopov struck Zádor, which gave him a big cut under his eye. Zádor got out of the pool and saw that the crowd was very upset. Many angry spectators jumped onto the pool deck to yell and spit at the Russians. To avoid a riot, police showed up and told the crowd to go away. One minute of the match remained when things were calm enough to continue.

The Hungarian and Soviet water polo teams were not friendly to begin the match because the Soviets had taken advantage of their political power in Hungary to learn from the Hungarian team, who were the previous Olympic champions.

On October 23, 1956, a group of students started a demonstration at the University of Budapest that came close to becoming a riot against the Soviet government’s control of Budapest. At the time, many people believed that Hungary was going to part ways from USSR control. 

To counter this demonstration, the Soviet Union sent tanks into Hungary and from November 4 to November 10 Soviet forces began suppressing the demonstration with air strikes, artillery attacks, and the presence of tanks and infantry on the ground.