Scholars of American Pro Sports Vault Into Academic Mainstream

For the professional referee, it’s being willing to work under more scrutiny than the president.

For fans waving Confederate flags at the Ole Miss game, it’s a sporting opportunity to flout Lincoln.

Union College anthropologist George Gmelch studies why people who love sports do what they do.

For him, North American sports culture is a window into North American culture at large, a microcosm of a society’s winner-loser mentality and a way to unite people who share nothing save geography.

Among academics, he’s not alone.

“I have the dream job,” Ithaca College professor Stephen Mosher said. “I watch ESPN and tell people what it means.”

Professional sports has become a multibillion-dollar industry, terms coined by sportscasters are part of everyday language, and sports imagery is everywhere. But experts in social research have been slow to ask why.

Gmelch, a former first baseman in the Detroit Tigers’ farm system, blames “that mind-body dichotomy” in which academia insists upon separating the physical from the intellectual.

“It’s ironic,” he said, “because we teach all these narrow things. Meanwhile, sports in this society is becoming like religion. There are books about it.”

Gmelch wrote one and is in the process of writing another.

“In the Ballpark,” published in 1998, delves into the culture of the baseball stadium. Gmelch interviewed, among others, Jerry Collier, a bond salesman who continues to moonlight as a beer vendor because “vending becomes its own game”; and Paul Zwaska, a groundskeeper who confesses, “I like baseball, but even more I like the way a baseball field looks.”

As sports go global, Gmelch sees cultural traits expressed on the courts and playing fields.

For the Japanese, it’s all about teamwork and saving others from embarrassment, even if it means passing bad players the basketball.

Gmelch’s second book will be more about the players, including those who don’t make it to the big leagues. Like him.

For more than a decade after his 1968 release from the Tigers’ farm system, he abandoned the sport, refusing to read the sports pages or watch the World Series.

Instead he earned a doctorate in anthropology. He married a fellow anthropologist, who in the 1980s urged him to go back and look at sports from a cultural standpoint.

Like Gmelch, Don Johnson, dean of the College of Arts and Science at East Tennessee State University, started out on the playing end and ended up on the academic end, teaching sports literature and editing the National Assn. of Sports Literature journal.

Born into a military family in Poca, W.Va., Johnson played four sports in high school and starred on the football team at the University of Hawaii from 1960 to ’64.

Johnson’s specialty now is literature. And the great recurring themes, he tells his students, are played out every day in sports.

“You’re in a confined area with generally a specific amount of time, and you play by the rules,” he said. “Moral issues arise when characters come into conflict with the rules.”

And sports games overflow with human drama, he said.

“It’s one of the few areas that allow day-to-day heroism and what might be called transcendence,” he said. “We see Michael Jordan doing things that humans should not be able to do.”

Academic sports studies evolved during the 1970s, as sports exploded on television and all sorts of ancillary occupations sprang up.

Between 1982 and ‘92, 1.5% of all college students took some sort of sports and leisure studies courses, said Clifford Adelman, senior research analyst for the U.S. Department of Education. Among the headings were history of sports, philosophy of sports, sports and society, economy of sports, sports and the law.

Even today, most sports courses are geared toward careers in physical education or sports management. There is even a bachelor of science degree in turf management.

Still, Jay Coakley, a University of Colorado at Colorado Springs professor now working on the seventh edition of his textbook “Sports and Society: Issues and Controversies,” could think of only two campuses offering master’s degrees in the subject.

“It’s still not a widely recognized topic,” he said.

Thirty years ago, he had to fight to teach his Sociology of Sports course.

“My colleagues at the time didn’t see this as a scholarly topic for us to devote our attention to,” he said.

But things were happening. Coakley saw ties between black sports heroes and the Civil Rights movements.

He was intrigued by the theories of Jack Scott, author of “The Athletic Revolution.” Scott had come out and attacked sports culture as militarized, conformity-generating and violence-perpetuating.

Now, Coakley says, those early ideas are getting more attention. And he’s taught Sociology of Sports practically every semester since.

He notes there are about 300 members in the 31-year-old North American Society for the Sociology of Sport.

The University of Toronto hired professor Peter Donnelly away from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, so that he could direct its new Center for Sports Policy Studies. Graduates, he said, might end up on the legislating end of the whole sports craze.

“There’s a great deal of government involvement in policing, drug testing--given the volume of media calls I get on a monthly basis, social issues are a major concern. There’s a need for policy expertise,” he said.

Students say the readings, discussions and debates have made them look at the sports world through wider eyes.

“We don’t have the politics like this summer, when I was in Israel,” said Josh Winograd, a senior history major at Union College from Long Island, N.Y. “We don’t have anything threatening, so we talk about sports.”