Life Story Research in Sport

Understanding the Experiences of Elite and Professional Athletes through Narrative

Kitrina Douglas, David Carless

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134622887
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: Sports Psychology

What is life really like for the elite athlete? How does the experience of being a professional sports person differ from the popular perceptions of fans, journalists or academics? Why might elite sports people experience mental health difficulties away from the public gaze?

In the first book-length study of its kind, Kitrina Douglas and David Carless present the life stories of real elite athletes alongside careful analysis and interpretation of those stories in order to better understand the experience of living in sport. Drawing on psychology, sociology, counselling, psychotherapy and narrative theory, and on narrative research in sports as diverse as golf, track and field athletics, judo and hockey, they explore the ways in which the culture of sport interacts with the mental health, development, identity and life trajectories of elite and professional sports people in highly pressurised and sometimes unhealthy environments.

By casting light on a previously under-researched aspect of sport, the book makes a call for strategies to be put in place to minimise difficulties or distress for athletes, for support to be tailored across the different life phases, and highlights the potential benefits in terms of athlete well-being and improved performance. The book also considers how these important issues relate to broader cultural and social factors, and therefore represents important reading for any student or professional with an interest in sport psychology, coaching, sport sociology, youth sport, counselling, or exercise and mental health.

1
Public portrayals of elite athletes

Joe Public just doesn’t have a clue what tournament golf is like. They haven’t got any idea.

(Golfer on the Ladies European Tour)

If a spaceship hovered over The Earth and its inhabitants watched through a high-powered telescope to see exactly what it is that human beings get up to, we wonder what they would make of sport. What sense would they make of people facing each other with foils and fists, or hitting things at each other, or chasing round after one another on foot, in boats, on bikes, on horses, and sometimes sitting in chairs? Would they be curious why large numbers of earthlings gather together in vast arenas to stare, shout, scream and applaud a small number of other humans? What would they make of the Haka or the singing of national anthems? What sense would they make of all the data collected about sports and sportspeople – on laptops, with stopwatches, through blood and urine samples, in newspaper articles, documentaries and films? Would they wonder why some of these individuals are placed aboard open-topped buses, paraded through streets lined with more humans doing more shouting and applauding while throwing tickertape into the air? Would the visitors’ sophisticated lenses deduce that some members of this small minority of earthlings influence the behaviour and consumer choices of many others? Would they be able to discern the magnitude and meaning of the inspiration and entertainment enjoyed by millions around the world as spectators and fans? Would they conclude that the men and women who play sport at this level are special – superhuman, perhaps?

We are inclined to see high-level sport as a strange phenomenon that has, for many of us all over the world, come to be seen as normal. While we humans typically look on, join in or try to avoid the circus of professional sport, mostly with a degree of acceptance of its ways, our imagined intergalactic visitors are more likely to be puzzled, surprised, concerned, shocked, amazed, appalled or confused. Unlike us, they have not had a lifetime of socialisation and enculturation into sport. They have not, over a period of years, reached an acceptance of the sometimes strange ways of elite and professional sport as ‘just the way it is’. Instead, they come to it fresh; devoid of assumptions and the received wisdom that, whether we recognise it or not, influences our experience, responses and understanding of more or less everything.

Most of us have, for a time at least, been personally immersed in sport in some capacity. In much of Europe, North America and Australasia, young people are exposed to sport at school through physical education, typically from the age of five or six through to 16 or 18. For some, leaving school signifies the end of their personal involvement in sport. Others continue to be involved in sport, perhaps recreationally, for health reasons or as a spectator. A smaller number continue to work in sport, perhaps as a coach or teacher, or as part of a support team (e.g. physiotherapist, psychologist, sport scientist). A smaller number still go on to play sport at the elite or professional level. All of these forms of personal involvement serve to socialise individuals into sport. They provide lessons on what sport is, what it is for, what matters in sport and what involvement in sport means. They teach what it is to be a sportsperson: what is required and what is expected. They define what is ‘normal’ when it comes to sport. Through these experiences we also learn about our own (potential) place within sport, our worth, our ability, our possible futures. All of us – to some extent – have learnt lessons through our personal experiences in sport. And all of us, should we wish, have the potential to reflect on these moments as a way of exploring our own assumptions regarding the ‘reality’ of high-level sport.

Aside from these personal experiences, there exist a multitude of public portrayals of sport. Perhaps more so than almost any other area of life, sport is represented to the public on a daily basis through thousands of public portrayals. These include television coverage, interviews, documentaries and features; newspaper, magazine and online articles; autobiographies and biographies; films and plays; policy documents; research papers and academic texts; ‘how-to’ manuals … the list is endless. The splashes these public portrayals create go on to stimulate or provoke further ripples in the form of conversations in pubs, debates in universities, arguments in changing rooms, twitter conversations, online posts and so on. Through these channels, public portrayals have a wide reach and exert a powerful influence, serving as a potent means of socialisation and enculturation into sport. They reach above and beyond personal experience, to shape the assumptions of not only those who live or work in sport but also of those who are not involved. It is hard to imagine anyone who has not, in some way, had their understanding of sport moulded by portrayals in the public domain.

These shaping processes are, we suggest, important and worthy of serious consideration, not least because they provide a key route through which assumptions regarding sport are seeded, germinated, fed and developed. It is precisely because they have not been exposed to public portrayals of sport that our imagined intergalactic visitors can come to sport afresh and with an open mind. They would be likely to see what is strange in the ‘normal’ – and, potentially, what is normal in the ‘strange’. In this book, we strive – as best we can – to place ourselves in a similar position of openness. We want to hear stories of sport anew, as our alien visitors might. Of course, this is not entirely possible, as we cannot completely divest ourselves of our assumptions. And at times the cultural legacy that underpins our assumptions can be useful in making sense of the stories we hear. There is, however, much to be gained from trying to become aware of our assumptions, by allowing them to become visible for a moment, so that we might appreciate how they can act as ‘blinkers’ or a ‘lens’ that shapes our understandings and expectations of high-level sportspeople. We invite you to do the same.

Thus, in this chapter, we step back to take a broad view across the sporting landscape, beyond disciplinary boundaries, to consider how sport and sportspeople are publicly portrayed. We hope to show that how we come to learn about what it means to be an elite athlete is coloured by a number of powerful social and cultural mores, those accepted traditional customs and usages of a particular social group that are passed down and embedded before we become aware of how they influence our expectations and understanding. This wide-angle view provides a social and cultural backdrop for the material we present in the rest of the book. It also provides part of our rationale for the methodological approaches we have chosen to use in our work (which we discuss in Chapters 2 and 3).

Within a single chapter we can only really skim the surface of the multitude of public portrayals of sport and sportspeople. Space constraints imply that we must focus ourselves to provide a brief account which, we hope, cuts to the heart of the issue. To this end, we focus on four particular characteristics that are evident in many public portrayals of high-level sport and sportspeople. Of course, each portrayal is somewhat unique – the many different stories are not all the same! However, many portrayals demonstrate recurring hallmarks. While not the only hallmarks, we think these four hold particular significance when it comes to understanding high-level athletes. In short, these characteristics have very real implications for the development, expectations, behaviours and lives of high-level sportspeople. In what follows, we consider each of these characteristics in detail, concluding with some reflections on how these forms of portrayal can come to shape ‘reality’ and influence people’s lives.

The sportsperson as hero

Irish golfer Christie O’Connor was one of the all-time greats of European golf. In the eyes of the Irish public at least, his status and reputation made it unnecessary to refer to him by his name. He was just known as Himself. You didn’t ask, ‘What did O’Connor score?’ You just asked, ‘What did Himself score?’ When the Spanish golfing sensation Severiano Ballesteros first arrived on Irish shores, he was recognised as the new star of the European tour – he was the upstart. Ballesteros was referred to as Yer Man. So, the story goes, when a fan arriving after the event had finished enquired, ‘Who won?’ he was told, ‘Yer Man beat Himself.’

This is merely an illustration of the ways in which the ‘big names’ in sport typically acquire a status that seems to elevate them above – often, way above – the average person in society. Among Irish golf fans at least, O’Connor and Ballesteros were simply too great to be referred to by name. Closely allied to this perceived ‘greatness’ is a strong sense of high-level sportspeople being lauded and held up as heroes (see Anderson, 2009; Sparkes, 2004). For some, heroism remains within the limits of their locale (e.g. particular sport, geographical location, period in time). For others, heroism seems to transcend beyond not only time and place but sport itself.

In Greek mythology, where we first encounter ‘the hero’, we learn that the role is associated with an individual who has developed highly refined skills, ability and who has courage. For Campbell (2008), who studied heroes across a variety of cultures, the ‘hero myth’ could be reduced to a singular story plot where ‘The protagonist undertakes a hazardous journey (for example, into Hades) in pursuit of truth and meaning’ (cited in McLeod, 1997: 60). The concept of valuing highly an individual who overcomes obstacles and challenges hasn’t been lost in our contemporary value system and is particularly garnered in sport. Autobiographies and biographies abound with stories that follow this narrative arc and these types of journeys provide models for others, especially young people, to follow and to which to aspire.

To give a flavour of the typical hero script we briefly draw on the story of round-the-world yachtswoman Emma Richards, as told in her autobiography Around Alone. The hero myth is predicated on overcoming obstacles, but Richards writes: ‘I don’t like to dwell on obstacles. … I take on challenges one step at a time, one mile at a time’ (2004: ix). Yet at the beginning of her voyage she reminds us of the obstacles that await her: broken bones, bandits, blows to the head and so on. She asks: is it feasible to expect to be rescued in the middle of an ocean should something go wrong? She chooses to set the scene for her epic voyage by speaking to her readers from atop the 80-foot mast, in the middle of the South Atlantic, in high winds and terrified by an image in her head of someone breaking the news to her parents that she had been killed. Nearly 300 pages are devoted to describing hardships, dedication to her goal and her disciplined focus. Then she writes: ‘For eight months and tens of thousands of miles I have been inching towards an imaginary peak. Now I was there. I’d done it’ (2004: 302). She was the youngest person to finish the Around Alone event and the first-ever woman. ‘It wasn’t a mountain that I’d scaled, but a roller-coaster’, she writes. She is immediately catapulted into the limelight, invited to parties and award ceremonies, where more glory is bestowed. She sips champagne on a luxury power boat off the Monaco coast with her sporting hero, Sebastian Coe, and reflects on a life that has become surreal, surrounded by the biggest names in sport, movie celebrities and royalty.

Richards’ journey – like the hero stories of many other athletes told through autobiographies and biographies, documentaries, interviews, movies and mass media – progresses from a challenge, through hardship and setbacks, to eventual triumph against the odds. It culminates with the individual being invited to join a select group of heroes through whom many in society expect to have their aspirations raised and their values affirmed, perpetuated and solidified (Klapp, 1962). As a special object of adulation, Smith (1973: 70) suggests, ‘the sports hero is both the instrument of and the mirror for a variety of social processes’. While the preferred type of hero may change – at times we want moral heroes, at other times, prowess heroes – these changes roughly parallel changes in societal values (Smith, 1973).

With hero status comes the potentially intoxicating effects of adulation and glory. Patricia and Peter Adler experienced its power to seduce during their research among college athletes. They describe, in the opening chapter of Backboards and Blackboards (Adler and Adler, 1991), how a student of Peter’s gave them complementary tickets to a basketball match. At this stage of their research they knew little about the player or the team but went along primarily because Peter was a basketball fan. They then describe the moment when the young student ran on to the court to be greeted by the fans chanting his name, or at least the name the fans had bestowed upon him: Apollo – the Greek god of light, god of truth, the archer with a silver bow. Late in the game, after a foul, they describe how ‘Apollo’ stepped forward to take the penalty. The moment is full of tension and anticipation. He paused, wiped his sweaty hands. At this moment the expectation of the huge crowd – as well as Patricia and Peter Adler – was that Apollo would take the shot. But no – he turned and looked directly at the two researchers sitting up in the stands. Then he took the shot. The two researchers tried to describe what they experienced in that moment, amidst the thousands of fans, to have the star player, the god of light, look upon them. They write, ‘the glance’ was ‘intoxicating’ (Adler and Adler, 1991: 3). It is the experience of this type of glory and adulation, or the lure of it, they learn later through their research, that the young men found impossible to resist: becoming a hero in the sport environment is just too seductive for many.

War metaphors

Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 5) describe metaphor as ‘understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another’. They influence the way in which we make sense of and interpret the world, ourselves and others (Richardson, 1994). They are bridges between what we recognise, understand and is familiar to us, and that which is unrecognisable. That is, metaphors ‘act as relays for transferring meaning, myth, and ideology from one pocket of cultural understanding to another’ (Bloor (1977), cited in Jansen and Sabo, 1994: 8). ‘They embody, exhibit, police, and preserve the withered mythologies that create social order and make communication possible’ (Jansen and Sabo, 1994: 8). Nisbet (1969: 5) suggests that:

It is easy to dismiss metaphor as ‘unscientific’ or ‘non-rational,’ a mere substitute for the hard analysis that rigorous thought requires. Metaphor, we say, belongs to poetry, to religion, and to other more or less ‘enchanted’ areas of thought. So it does. But metaphor also belongs to philosophy and even to science.

The linking of sport and war through metaphor is commonplace in broadcasting, journalism and film as well as in the spoken word, both public and private. A large degree of the language of sport and war seems to be used interchangeably. Jansen and Sabo (1994) and Jenkins (2013) provide insights into this symbiotic relationship between war-speak and sport-speak, illustrating how, during war, soldiers, generals and politicians often adopt sport metaphors to make points, explain issues and illuminate their ideology. During the First World War, the following excerpt appeared in print:

Cricketers … can help to bowl out the Germans, who started hitting hard before some of their opponents could take their places in the field. The Allies are hoping to ‘have a knock’ on the other side of the Rhine.

(Athletic News, 7 December 1914, cited in John, 2013: 20)

More recently, during the Gulf War, United States President George Bush accused Saddam Hussein of ‘stiff-arming’ (a footballing term meaning to fend of an opponent) while US pilots likened their bombing raids to a football game. War journalists too use sport metaphors as they describe ‘the play’ for their audiences. This strategy ‘coerces citizens into displays of patriotism and national unity when it may not exist and to quiet political dissent when it arises’ (Jenkins, 2013: 258).

Conversely, in sport, journalists routinely adopt the language of war to create different yet no less powerful allegiances and images that help make sport appear serious and dramatic. A rugby player, for example, has ‘a mission’ to score, running towards a pair of upright posts he or she might be ‘weaving through a minefield’ of defenders. These kinds of metaphors help provide an awareness of the danger to the player and how her or his objective may be thwarted by the defence of the opposition – ‘the enemy’. A golfer’s shot to the pin becomes a ‘guided missile’ to communicate the accuracy and consistency of the professional. There is a sense of speed and propulsion in the metaphor that is not conveyed with the words, ‘Davis hit her drive towards the pin’.

Some coaches, too, propa...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Public portrayals of elite athletes
• 2 Life story research and the contribution of the insider
• 3 Our research journey
• 4 The performance narrative
• 5 The discovery narrative
• 6 The relational narrative
• 7 Learning the story: enculturation of young athletes
• 8 Living, playing or resisting the part of ‘athlete’
• 9 The consequences of stories at retirement
• 10 Asylum and the conditions for story change
• 11 Reflections
• References
• Index