The Social Roles of Sport in Caribbean Societies

Michael A Malec

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136823381
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2004. Caribbean Studies publishes the research of academic scholars working within the region, as well as Caribbeanists working internationally. Little has been written about sports in the Caribbean from the perspectives of the social sciences. In this volume, scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, government, and sociology cast their critical eyes on the social institution of sport as it exists in the Caribbean. Baseball, basketball, cricket, football, horse racing, and other sports are examined.

CHAPTER 1

NEGLECTED FIELDS: SPORTS IN THE CARIBBEAN

Michael A. Malec

INTRODUCTION

The essays in this volume cover a variety of sports: the emphases are on baseball, basketball, cricket, football (soccer), and horse racing, but other sports are dealt with indirectly or in passing. The essays cover sports played in several specific locales: Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, St. Vincent, and St. Croix, as well as the Caribbean region generally. Although there is no clear organizational, pedagogical, or thematic reason for the selection of particular sports or locales, all of the essays do have some elements in common, as the title of this volume indicates.

The following essays are concerned with the social aspects of sport. While some of the essays were written by scholars in the fields of anthropology, economics, government, and physical education, most were written by sociologists. How do these scholars help us to understand the social aspects of sport? Let us consider several possibilities.

Sports and Race

In 1990, I visited the training camps, of among others, the women’s national volleyball and synchronized swimming teams in Cuba. I noticed that the volleyballers were black (11 of 12) and the swimmers were not (none of 24). In three separate interviews, I asked the swimming coach, an administrator of the national training center, and my translator why there was this seeming racial disparity in the composition of the two squads. All three answers were essentially the same. “Our researchers have found,” I was told, “that there are systematic differences in the bodies of blacks and whites. They have different biotypes. The black volleyballers have quicker reflexes; the white swimmers are more buoyant.” All of this was said matter-of-factly, with reference to scientific studies conducted by Cuban sport physiologists. Unlike what happened in the United States only two or three years earlier, no one was fired for expressing racist views.

Are Cubans more racist than North Americans? Are there biological differences between black and white athletes? Are there innate intellectual (or other) differences between blacks and whites? A sociological approach to the questions of race in sport should be able to shed some light on these questions. While we do not propose to answer these questions in this volume—but note that several chapters in this book point to the impact of race on cricket and other sports—interested readers should seek out some of the many books and articles that have been written on this topic.

Sports and Politics

In 1980, the United States and many of its allies boycotted the summer Olympic Games held in Moscow. This was done because the United States government wanted to protest in a very public manner, a manner that would attract special attention, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Four years later, the Soviets and some of their allies boycotted the summer Olympic games held in Los Angeles. This was done, said the Soviets, because the Americans could not guarantee the Soviets protection from terrorist attacks. Neither in 1980 nor in 1984 did the American or Soviet athletes have much of a voice in the determination of their governments’ policies. In the history of sport, what is unusual about these two actions is only their size and venues. The sports boycott has become a standard diplomatic tool in the modern world. Why can’t the games be left to the players? Should the games be left to the players? To whom do the games “belong”? A study of the connections between sport and politics will help us to understand these issue more fully. While not focusing on the Olympics, several of the articles in this volume do address questions dealing with sports and politics.

Sports and Societies

The examples above raise challenging questions for anyone who is interested in sports as well as for anyone who is interested in sociology or, more generally, for anyone who seeks to understand how and why we humans behave in social settings, in societies.

The man or woman who loves sport, whether as a participant, a spectator, or a fan, ought not to limit his or her interest in sport to the playing of (or watching of or reading about) the game. Of course the athlete, spectator, and fan should enjoy the game. But if an athlete does not take the enjoyment of the game to another level, one that involves an attempt to know, to understand, to study the game, then the athlete will be less successful as an athlete. This knowledge, understanding, and study are essential elements of success since no sport is purely a physical activity. Every sport has within it some elements that are psychological, emotional, and social. And if the sport is in any way organized, it most probably has within it elements that are economic, political, religious, and educational. And all of the skills that the athlete possesses were acquired in environments that were composed of family, friends, coaches, referees, spectators, and opponents. The athlete, to be a better athlete, ought to study all of these elements.

As another example, consider the discus, a somewhat obscure object in the history of sport. Today, the discus used in international competition must be of a standard circumference, weight, and composition. But 2500 years ago, when the Greeks were heaving these strange objects through the air, they didn’t particularly care whether my discus was heavier than yours, or of a different diameter. Yet it is important for us to study the various physical objects (discuses, javelins, boxing “gloves”) used by the Greeks, Romans, and others in order to know something about the games that they played and the history that leads us to the games that we play. But even more important, I think, is the question: WHY do we require the discus to be of a standard weight, circumference, and composition, while the ancient Greeks felt that discuses could be of various sizes, shapes, and weights?

The scholar spends time studying the composition of the atom, or the causes of the Industrial Revolution, or the novels of VS Naipaul. These are worthy objects of study, and universities build them into their curricula. But are football, horse racing, and cricket worthy of similar study? Should a scholar “waste” time studying “mere” games? Should I be writing this book? Should you be reading it?

Clearly, I believe that the answer to the previous questions is a resounding YES. There are several reasons for this. First, any human activity is deserving of study, especially if that activity occupies a great deal of time and resources, as does sport. Second, significant generalizations with implications for personal and societal conduct emerge from the study of sport. (See, for example, Cummings’ work in Chapter 4.)

A third reason that justifies the scholarly study of sport is not so much the object of our study, but what we do with what we learn from our study. In this book, the object is sport. In some other textbook the object might be Caribbean economic systems, or aerodynamic engineering, or Homer’s Illiad or Wolcott’s Omerus. Each of these is a worthy object of study not only in and of itself, but also because we can use our knowledge of each of these objects in order to better ourselves, individually and collectively. Thus, while you could take a course on racism, or the family, or international politics, or human kinesiology because you are interested in or enjoy those subjects, you also take the course because in some sense you can also use your acquired knowledge to better yourself or your society. In studying sport, for example, we might look at the history of racism in North American professional baseball. Part of the reason for this aspect of our inquiry is because race has had and still has a profound influence on modern American sport. But if we confine our study of race and racism to sport alone, if we do not extend our knowledge of Jackie Robinson’s entry into major league baseball, or of the emergence of the black cricketer in the Caribbean, beyond sport and into our everyday lives, then this book will be a failure.

The sociology of sport is a systematic study of how humans behave in social settings. That it happens to be “of” sport (or of the family, or of social problems, or of whatever) simply defines a focal point. The sociological content of our studies of sport ought to enable us to generalize to other areas of human social interaction. As Anderson points out in Chapter 5, learning about sexism in sports ought to teach us something about sexism in our societies, in our daily lives. To me, this book is first a sociology book, with perspectives that are different from those of history or literature or economics or psychology. The sociological perspective will borrow from these other perspectives wherever it is helpful. But we will “keep the focus on the socius.” Finally, while this book consists mainly of essays in the sociology of sport, it is also, most importantly, a book about sport in the Caribbean.

WHAT WE STUDY: SOME DEFINITIONS

In Jamaica, an eight-year-old child is running along a road. She’s having fun. She’s playing. She is running just for the sake of running. There are no competitors, no stop-watch. She is enjoying the breeze in her face, the smell of the countryside, the vague sense of awareness of how her muscles are propelling her through time and space.

On a playground in Trinidad, a basketball player drives to the basket. His team is down by a single point, and there are two seconds left in the game. Eight feet from the basket, his lane is blocked. He stops, fakes, pivots, jumps, shoots.

In Havana, a chess grand master is playing one of the most difficult matches of his career. His opponent is the newest computer, programmed to play chess as no other computer has ever done. The tension in the room is thick; the master is sweating profusely. He is aware that this game is between the greatest human chess player and the best computer program yet devised. Indeed, the computer’s play seems almost human.

At home, I switch on the tube, looking for something to watch. My choices include (a) professional wrestling—on three different channels, (b) something called “The American Gladiators,” in which men and women flail at each other in a variety of mock combats, (c) a sports trivia call-in show, (d) a tape-delay broadcast of last year’s “Mr. & Ms. Muscle Las Vegas” contest, and (e) the current variety of Roller Derby.

Of the activities in the above four paragraphs, which would you call “sport”? Allen Guttmann (1978) has proposed a set of distinctions among what he calls PLAY, GAMES, CONTESTS, and SPORTS. Play, he says, “is any non-utilitarian physical or intellectual activity pursued for its own sake.” The Jamaican child, above, is playing. She is running just to run. She has no opponent, neither human, nor a clock, nor some aspect of nature. Later in her life she might be identified as an athlete, she might compete in the Olympics, but for now, she, like children all over the world, is enjoying being a child, being at play. Her action is spontaneous, in the sense that it has no purpose except itself.

However, should her action (running) become organized, should her spontaneity become bound by rules, whether written or unwritten, whether simple or complex, her play will have changed into a game. A game is organized play. An example of a game is leapfrog. This is a physical activity that consists of running and leaping and being leaped over. It is joyful fun, but it is also bound by rules. These rules are very simple, and usually are not written down; the rules are learned informally. Children learn how to leap, who jumps over whom, and in what sequence. They cannot jump at random. They must jump from the rear. They must allow others to jump over them. These are some of the rules of the game.

Another aspect of leapfrog is that it is noncompetitive: it has no winner. But many games are structured so that there is a winner, so that the participants compete against each other or against the clock or against nature. A contest is a competitive game. The Jamaican girl is not competing against anyone, but should she become an Olympian, she would compete against others. The basketball player is competing. So too is the chess grand master. For each of these people there is competition, a contest. However, the chess player differs from the other two in that his activity, even though it requires a certain amount of physical energy and stamina, is essentially an intellectual, not a physical, contest. The same can be said of the tournament bridge player. Contestants in intellectual games are usually not called athletes. Their games are usually not called sports.

A sport is a physical contest. Those who compete in sports are called athletes. The basketball game and the chess match are similar in that both involve a competitor, both involve training and strategy, both result in a winner and loser. But one of these contests is essentially intellectual, the other is primarily physical.

These four types of activity are summarized in Figure 1:

Source: Adapted from Guttmann (1978:9)

FIGURE 1: Play, Games, Contests, and Sports

And what about the various activities that I looked at on television? Is professional wrestling a sport? Few people would say it is. Note that its results are rarely covered in the sports pages of your daily newspaper, or on the evening news broadcast. Professional wrestling is not a sport because it is not a contest. There are no true winners and losers. The event is staged; it is a form of entertainment, or what Coakley (1994) calls a spectacle. The same can be said of roller derby and the gladiator show.

Is body-building a sport? Clearly, there is a contest with rules and winners and losers, and the outcome is not scripted, as in professional wrestling. It is essentially physical, not primarily intellectual. Even though most of the physical activity (the building of the bodies) is done prior to the competition, and despite the fact that the competition itself seems to be more of a spectacular display of a finished product of physical activity than a physical competition per se, if we use Guttmann’s typology, body building is a sport. Of course, Guttmann’s typology is not definitive, and scholars disagree as to the definition of terms such as play and sport.

WAYS OF APPROACHING THE STUDY OF SPORT

Even though sport, like any object of scholarly inquiry, is deserving of study for its own sake, most of us are not inclined to pursue a subject for that reason. More often, we become interested in knowledge if we can see a use for that knowledge, if that knowledge helps us to understand something about our universe, our society, or our self. The realm of sport contains many issues that need analysis and understanding, many problems that need resolution. These issues and problems can and should be approached from a variety of perspectives. Let us briefly consider a few of these.

Sports and Sociology

Sport is a social phenomenon. Even in our chess example above, the opponent is not the computer chips but the people who wrote the software. The emergence and development of sport depend on the emergence and development of society and of certain conditions in society, including religion, leisure time, and urbanization. To know something about sport, we must also know something about the kind of societies that develop and nurture sports. Why do we think of modern sport beginning in ancient Greece rather than China? Why did the modern concept of amateurism emerge in England rather than Argentina?

Further, sport performs certain functions for society. Some scholars point to the fact that sport acts as a cohesive force, binding people together and providing a sense of unity. We see this cohesiveness in Olympic years, when many citizens share a sense of pride and identification with the athletes who represent their country. “School spirit” is another form of social cohesion that is fostered by sports in the high schools and colleges. Even in the aftermath of massive physical disaster, sport can act as a unifying agent. Mitrano and Smith, in this volume, have suggested ways that horse racing helped to repair the “social fabric” of society in the Caribbean island of St. Croix in the months following Hurricane Hugo.

Questions of this sort are often approached from a sociological perspective. Sociologists tend to view the world by focusing attention on the behavior of human being as such behavior is shap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Introduction to the Series
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Neglected Fields: Sports in the Caribbean
• Chapter 2 Cricket, Colonialism, and the Culture of Caribbean Politics
• Chapter 3 West Indian Cricket as Cultural Resistance
• Chapter 4 Ideologies of West Indian Cricket
• Chapter 5 Gender, Inequality, Sport, and Professional Achievement in Jamaica
• Chapter 6 Headcase, Headstrong, and Head-of-the-Class: Resocialization and Labelling in Dominican Baseball
• Chapter 7 A Parkboy Remembers Colts, Products of a Subculture of Sport
• Chapter 8 Wither Jets, Hawks, and Civic? Conflict, Continuity, and Change in the Organization of Sport in a Trinidad Community: The Case of Port Fortin, 1970–1993
• Chapter 9 Open Cultural Space: Grassroots Basketball in the English-Speaking Caribbean
• Chapter 10 The Making and Remaking of White Lightning in Cuba: Politics, Sport, and Physical Education Thirty Years after the Revolution
• Chapter 11 “And They’re Off”: Sport and the Maintenance of Community in St. Croix