From the Introduction:

THE RITUALS of sport engage more people in common experience than any other single institution or cultural activity today. World Cup soccer gathers upwards of a billion electronic spectators on a global basis for one sport alone. According to generally accepted estimates, between two and three billion people watched on television or listened on radio to the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. According to the Toronto Star, in 1994 Edson Arantes do Nascimento, the Brazilian soccer super-star better known as "Pele" was "the most recognizable face in the world." Sports Illustrated insisted in the same year that this distinction belonged to former heavyweight champion Mohammed Ali. When the US. space probe landed on Mars in July 1997 and began sending back photographs of the planet's surface, a NASA spokesman compared the moment to "winning the Superbowl, the World Cup and the World Series three days in a row ". This was the only metaphor he could find, he explained, that was sufficiently marvelous to convey the wonder of Sojourner's discoveries.

These examples of the place that sport occupies in our psyches and our mythologies attest to the global power of its language and culture, and the extraordinary interest and allegiance it claims. There have certainly been long moments of public alienation from commercial sport in the 1980s and 1990s in North America: Pete Rose and gambling, Ben Johnson and steroids, Mike Tyson and rape, battery and mayhem, the baseball strike and hockey lockout in 1994 and 1995 (two protracted spectacles of greed from owners and players alike). Yet the appeal and the reach of the sport nexus - that web of associated and interlocking organizations that includes sports, media, industry and many levels of government, and public education and recreation - continues to grow year by year. Born in the nineteenth century, sport adapted brilliantly to the twentieth. It shows every sign of being ready to continue that adaptation into the twenty-first, even as many other non-industrial forms of culture struggle to emerge or survive.

This book is an exploration of the close and abiding relationship between masculinism and capitalism - practiced, modeled and animated through the culture of sport. It is an exploration of how masculine dominance is constructed, embodied and promoted in the associations, economies and culture of the modern sport nexus. And it is about how, via sport, masculinism encourages and promotes other ideologies and other forms of inequality - notably economic, racial, and biotic hierarchies. It seeks to show how sport, interacting with other forms of culture, generates the ideology of what I call hypermasculinity. I use this term to refer to an exaggerated, super-large, super-strong and super-aggressive ideal of manhood linked mythically and practically to the role of the warrior. This book seeks in a number of ways to link the hypermasculine culture of sport to anti-social tendencies in society: to militarist impulses and institutions, and the rise of neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative, law-and-order politics in North America.

When I began working on this book ten years ago I did not hold the belief that masculinism - the political ideology of our male-superior gender order - was all that sport is or can be about. Nor did I complete the project with such a view. Sport has been, at times, the site of many experiences of bonding and solidarity, pleasure, achievement and healthful activity for people of both sexes, all ages, classes, and racial, ethnic and linguistic groups. Many of its physical activities and game forms have promoted personal well-being, community bonding and social equality. Large numbers of people pursue physical activity in such ways today, outside the framework of competitive sport, even as they utilize skills and gestures they may have learned within it. Recreational sport often delivers just these positive experiences.

Yet for all these realities - to which I will return at appropriate moments in the pages that follow - it remains true at the same time that the culture of big-time sport generates, reworks and affirms an elitist, masculinist account of power and the social order - an account of its own entitlement to power. Because of my own preoccupation with egalitarian politics, and because this is the account that is too often downplayed or omitted from our understanding of sport culture, this is what I have set out to elucidate. By necessity this has meant a prolonged focus on some of the most troubling and anti-social dimensions of sport culture. These dimensions co-exist in dynamic and contradictory tension with the more positive experiences of sport, both institutionally, and in the lives of individual athletes and those involved in sport culture.

(c) Varda Burstyn.