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theses

The populist moment of 2016 drove multiple academic disciplines together in a Kierkegaardian way. They realized that complacently living life forward in liberal democracies now required an understanding life backwards of in terms of tribalism and identity. An emerging consensus—that multiple ethnic identities should be contained within a greater single civic/creedal identity—highlighted an enduring tension between two ready components in sports: gamesmanship (the tribal reality of winning, mostly through professionalism) and sportsmanship (the rule-of-law ideal of playing well, ideally through amateurism). American football’s unique provenance as a highly commercial and physical game within higher education’s ideals of intellectual and noncommercial educational excellence, offers a unique study of the power of gamesmanship to shape sportsmanship while illuminating its realistic and historic contained boundaries. This study anchors the conceptual underpinnings of this gamesmanship | sportsmanship dialectic to Henri Tajfel’s empirical development of social identity and Hannah Arendt’s theoretical construct of political action. It demarcates a three-fold “changing landscape” of stadiums through Play | Performance | Entertainment, reflected in the systemic power of gamesmanship to define sportsmanship. This occurred as temporary wooden structures, with questionable seating and standing arrangements (1869-1918-play), gave way to massive concrete bowls with reliable and egalitarian seating (1919-1945-performance), and finally created a demand for indoor fan friendlier seating, including luxury boxes and video scoreboards (1946-1969-entertainment). This process was personified by a gamesmanship | sportsmanship heuristic employed within each period respectively, by three prominent football coaches, each with a distinct rationalizations of gamesmanship in the name of sportsmanship, as the game grew. These include first, football’s formative development and promotion by Yale’s Walter Camp, second, its spectacularization by Notre Dame’s Knute Rockne, and finally its full commercialization as an entertainment product by the championship success of Green Bay’s Vince Lombardi, itself quickly superseded in 1969 by the entertaining persona of Joe Namath. This serves as a useful end point of this study, when professional football finally and enduringly overtook its collegiate antecedent to produce America's single largest entertainment and commercial vehicle—its annual championship game, the Super Bowl. Entertainment became the new sportsmanship.
The historic gamesmanship | sportsmanship lessons of the game for populist reform is clear. Collegiate football has been locked in a Sisyphean cycle of abuses followed by piecemeal reforms, with all attempts to remedy its gamesmanship abuses condemned to failure, for they are based on a sportsmanship ideal that never was. Only when gamesmanship is acknowledged as the catalyst for entertainment, can it then productively define a sportsmanship able to contain it. Sports can be an exemplar of politics at its best, when participants can experience the intensity of joy and despair without the risks that generate such feelings in real life.

ETD_9859

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-n9t3-2109

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.