Sporting Performances

Politics in Play

Shannon L. Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367210564
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429560187
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Sporting Performances is the first anthology to tackle sports and physical culture from a performance perspective; it serves as an invitation and provocation for scholarly discourse on the connections between sports and physical culture, and theatre and performance.

Through a series of intriguing case studies that blur the lines between the realms of politics, sports, physical culture, and performance, this book assumes that sporting performances, much like theatre, serve as barometers, mirrors, and refractors of the culture in which they are enmeshed. Some of the topics include nineteenth-century variety show pugilists, athletes on Broadway, sumo wrestlers, rhythmic gymnasts, and Strava enthusiasts. While analyzing sport through the lens of theatre and performance, this anthology reflects on how physical culture and sports contribute to identity formation and the effects of nuanced imprints of physical activity on the mind, soul, and tongue.

Written primarily for those interested in physical fitness, sports, dance, and physical theatre, this interdisciplinary volume is a crucial tool for Performance and Theatre Studies students and those in the fields of Sports Studies, Cultural Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and American Studies more broadly.

PART I

Containing political violence on stages, fields, and dohyos

1

“You’re out!”

Presence and absence at the ballpark

Sean Bartley

On April 27th and 28th, 2015, as public demonstrations in downtown Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody intensified, and city officials declared a state of emergency and imposed an evening curfew, Major League Baseball (MLB) and the Baltimore Orioles cancelled two games between the Orioles and the Chicago White Sox. By the evening of April 28th, daunted by the proposition of rescheduling additional games, MLB and the Orioles announced a new solution: the next day’s game would be played in Camden Yards, the Orioles’ home stadium, just feet from the active protests, but would be closed to the public who had purchased tickets. Television and radio broadcasts transmitted the uncanny scene to audiences: MLB teams playing to a completely empty stadium. Gates surrounding Camden Yards, normally used to deny access to those who had not bought tickets, served in this instance as barriers to insulate the performers both from their adoring, paying audience and from the Black protesters eager for the city’s most high-profile residents, the Orioles, to acknowledge their pleas for racial justice and police accountability.

This chapter will explore not just the present and absent constituencies (players, umpires, journalists, fans, and others), but also the ways that organizers surprisingly maintained the game’s highly theatrical ballpark conventions. The Orioles’ “game presentation” staff kept not only the performances of the National Anthem and “God Bless America,” but also the introductions of players and promotional advertisements and the “walk-up music” chosen by players to pump up the non-existent crowd. How did media outlets frame and disseminate this unique moment in baseball history? How did the Orioles’ management and players explain why they chose to play the game and how they chose to play it? How might sporting events and current discourses on site-based performances inform one another?

The most obvious audience members for the theatrical labor of the Orioles and White Sox, the 30,000 or more fans who had purchased a seat, were conspicuously absent, but were offered a chance to exchange their tickets for another game at Camden Yards.¹

However, several other types of audiences observed and interacted with the game in a variety of formats. The Mid-Atlantic Sports Network, WGN-TV, WLS-AM, and WJZ-FM, the Orioles’ and White Sox’s television and radio partners, broadcast the game locally in Maryland and Illinois. MLB.TV, Major League Baseball’s paid service for streaming out-of-market games online, picked the unique event as the “Free Game of the Day,” allowing fans nationally with or without a subscription to watch the proceedings. The press box, filled past capacity with 92 baseball writers and other journalists in town to cover the protests, provided a steady stream of tweets, vines, and blog posts of the sights and sounds from inside the park.² A small group of professional scouts took seats near home plate, tracking pitch speeds on radar guns and recording them in notebooks. The Oriole Bird, the team’s mascot, was absent. With no vendors or security personnel roving the concourses or aisles, two MLB memorabilia authenticators recovered all of the foul balls and home runs hit by the players. Two dozen or so fans leaned against the locked gates of the stadium entrance on South Eutlaw Street beyond the right field bleachers, peering into the park and cheering at appropriate intervals. One fan held a sign reading “Don’t Forget Freddie Gray” with the letter “o” in the words “don’t” and “forget” highlighted with the swirling orange and Black font that decorates the Orioles’ home jerseys.³

Like many purpose-built theatrical spaces, Camden Yards has two clearly delineated areas: a field for players and a stadium structure for spectators. This stadium, designed to maximize ticket revenue, distinguishes a baseball field in a local park from the home of a professional team with a 2015 payroll of over $140 million.⁴ The baseball field’s utility is surrounded and superseded by the scale of the stadium and the tens of thousands of fans sitting in the stands dwarfing the twenty-five players on each roster. To borrow two terms from Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance, Camden Yards serves as both “auditorium” and “site.”⁵ For Pearson the two terms are fluid: “The auditorium might yet provide a control, an abstracted set of conditions, against which to extrapolate the particularities of site work, all that might absorb and impact upon practice (whilst acknowledging that the auditorium is itself a site, equally susceptible to conceptual readdress).”⁶ Pearson describes auditorium and site as intrinsically linked in scientific terms, envisioning performance as a kind of experiment. “In the auditorium,” Pearson states, “the audience is cast as audience: purposefully assembled, expectant, disposed, potentially appreciative.”⁷ At site, however, “the audience may be incidental—those present in the same place at the same time—and obdurate.”⁸ Performers in many site-based performances routinely perform a scene without any audience members present, unsure when and if a spectator might arrive in their corner of the larger theatrical installation. The co-presence Pearson describes as “incidental” may or may not shape the resulting performance event. On this particular day at Camden Yards, the multiple “incidental” audiences exercised considerable authority over the game itself. Broadcasters and players both found themselves longing for the audience “cast as audience” and playing to the various “incidental” audiences. In his final definitional distinction between the two terms, Pearson notes that “In the auditorium this sort of thing has happened before,” whereas “at site, it is always as if for the first time.”⁹ On this one day, I contend, Camden Yards served as both. Despite the best efforts of players, coaches, attendants, broadcasters, and others to inhabit the auditorium in a familiar way, the absence of the primary audience forced these performers to reconsider their relationship both to the confines of the stadium as a site and to the larger sites of the city, beyond the closed gates: those individuals staring into Camden Yards, and those negotiating other barriers in Baltimore. Rather than risk acknowledging the full argument of the city’s protestors, the Orioles, state and local officials, and Major League Baseball opted to make Camden Yards, where the average ticket in 2015 cost $25, an even more exclusionary space.

First, this chapter will outline the days of public demonstrations, press conferences, and Orioles games leading up to the infamous closed competition. Next, I’ll fully document the game as a theatrical performance, in part because a comprehensive record of the game and its cross-platform dissemination does not exist. In my final section, I’ll contend that theatre historiographers and performance studies scholars are, in fact, ideally suited documentarians and analysts of sporting events like this one, and that site-based performance provides a constructive lens for considering sports. Like other protesters fueled by local Black Lives Matter chapters in recent years, these Baltimore demonstrators possessed a keen theatrical understanding of how to stage disruption in exclusionary spaces. Their marches took place not in West Baltimore, the Black neighborhood where police murdered Freddie Gray, ignoring his desperate pleas for medical attention for over 45 minutes, but rather in the heavily gentrified Inner Harbor, a highly theatrical space for staging city and state authority and athletic, retail, and cultural production.

Warm-ups

It was seemingly logical that spectators would become a part of modern sport, and that theater would become the abiding metaphor for sport.¹⁰

On Saturday, April 25th, 2015, over 1,200 demonstrators peacefully marched from City Hall to Camden Yards. When they first arrived near the ballpark at roughly 4 p.m., they found the neighborhood largely deserted. However, when some protesters looped back to the stadium after circling the Inner Harbor two hours later, they encountered thousands of Orioles and Red Sox fans preparing for a 7:05 p.m. baseball game and extending the reach of both auditorium and site outside Camden Yards to the bars, restaurants, and vendors on Eutlaw and Camden Streets. In When the Crowd Didn’t Roar: How Baseball’s Strangest Game Ever Gave a Broken City Hope, Orioles reporter for the Baltimore Sun, Kevin Cowherd, described the tense exchange:

Although some fans express solidarity with the marchers who are chanting “Black lives matter!”, some in the two groups begin exchanging jeers. Soon a volley of bottles and cans is being flung at the bar patrons, some of whom are also attacked by protestors … Near the ballpark’s main entrance police in riot gear form a three-deep barrier behind bicycle racks in a tense standoff with the crowd … “Good luck getting home tonight!” one protestor yells to a group of wide-eyed Red Sox fans, who appear to be ruing the great hotel rate and discount airfare that lured them down from New England.¹¹

Police arrested 35 people outside Camden Yards. Implicit in Cowherd’s description is the sense that these streets outside the stadium belong to the fans rather than the protestors. These are public spaces where Orioles fans routinely congregate hours before home games to loiter in the streets, chant and shout at rival fans, and drink alcohol extensively and publicly from open containers. Though the thousands of overwhelmingly white Orioles fans dwarfed the few hundred remaining Black protestors who had been peaceful until they met the Orioles fans “pregaming” on the street, the only acts of violence described in Cowherd’s account come from the activists. The white reporter marks the marching Black residents as the purported threat, not the drinking “fanatics.” He attempts to soften the image of the fans, calling them “bar patrons” through they are drinking and clashing with demonstrators not inside the bars on Camden and Eutlaw streets, but out on the streets. He also completely ignores the fact that many of these Baltimore-native demonstrators, of course, are enormous Orioles fans themselves, participants in the daily life of the city—who might well be watching the team play that night if not for their more pressing political action.

As the innings stretched on and the moving protest crowds looping the Inner Harbor appeared poised to return to the area for a third time, Baltimore Police Headquarters ordered Lieutenant Dennis Reinhart, head of stadium security, to lock Camden Yards’ gates and keep the 36,757 ticketholders inside the stadium indefinitely.¹² Jumbotrons inside the stadium displayed an ominous message, hastily written by Orioles’ Public Relations Director Kristen Hudak: “Due to an ongoing public safety issue, the mayor of Baltimore and the Baltimore Police Department have asked all fans to remain in the ballpark until further notice.”¹³ Two major developments resolved the tense standoff. First, rainfall late in the game encouraged demonstrators to return home. Second, the game went into extra innings, ended by a game-winning home run by the Orioles in the tenth inning. By the time the home team had walked off, officials permitted fans to leave. In a nearby press conference, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake invited Fredericka Gray, Freddie Gray’s twin sister, to address the escalating demonstrations. “Can y’all please, please stop the violence?” she implored. “Freddie Gray would not want this …Violence does not get justice.”¹⁴

Meanwhile, Orioles Executive Vice-President John Angelos, son of team owner Peter Angelos, while travelling in New York that night on preexisting business, pulled out his smartphone and sent a late-night, 21-tweet stream of frustration. After echoing Gray and Rawlings-Blake’s calls for nonviolence, he drilled down to the root causes of the demonstrations and the relative importance of Orioles games in the midst of Baltimore’s pain:

My greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage … but is focused rather upon the past fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The field of our play
• PART I: Containing political violence on stages, fields, and dohyos
• PART II: Playing global politics: The Olympics and fútbol
• PART III: The biopolitics of sports and physical culture: The regulated and regulating body
• PART IV: Political efficacy: Spectacle, celebrity athletes, and protest
• List of contributors
• Index