The Field of Play In

BETWEEN THESE LINES: THE FIELD OF PLAY IN

CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

MATTHEW SCOTT TETTLETON

Bachelor of Arts, 2010 University of Texas at Arlington Arlington, Texas

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of AddRan College of Liberal Arts Texas Christian University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

May, 2015

With special thanks to my wife, Meghan, whose love and support are incomparable, with

thanks to my graduate student colleagues and friends in the TCU English Department, and

with thanks to my committee—Dr. David Colón, Dr. Neil Easterbrook, and Dr. Jason

Helms—I dedicate this thesis in memory of Dr. David Vanderwerken, who showed me that

this whole thing was possible.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Introduction: Between These Lines 1

1 United Loyalties: Basketball in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian 14

2 Telling Moments: The Kairos of Baseball’s Segregation and the Chronotopes of August Wilson’s Fences 38

3 “Bourgeois Nationalism”: The Strange Bedfellows of American Soccer Fandom 63

Works Cited 90

Vita

Abstract

iii

Introduction: Between These Lines

In a recent speaking engagement at the University of Texas at Arlington, noted sports broadcaster Bob Costas spoke about his favorite moment broadcasting the Olympic Games.

The moment Costas identified was at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta; as Costas described the events of the opening ceremony that day, the producers kept from Costas the identity of the final person in the torch relay who would officially light the Olympic flame.

When Muhammad Ali was revealed as the torch lighter, the Costas on the 1996 broadcast exclaimed, “What a moment!” The Costas sitting on the stage in 2015 reliving the moment remarked that he was proud of his spontaneous reaction right up until he said “What a moment!” Costas felt that the special quality of the moment was self-evident, and that that his pronouncement cheapened it. But what was remarkable to Costas about that event was the way Ali became a unifying figure in that moment. In the prime of his career, Ali’s stand against conscription in the Vietnam War made him a reviled figure for many Americans; though as Costas pointed out, many respected his anti-establishment stance at the time. In

1996, however, the crowd in Atlanta collectively celebrated Ali. They respected that Ali had the courage of his convictions and that he was willing to represent the nation that had treated him harshly in the past. The Olympics, Costas said, can have a unifying effect like this.

Unlike big sporting events such as the NCAA’s Final Four or the Super Bowl, the whole crowd at the Olympics is rooting for the same side. Since the Games were held in the Atlanta that year, the crowd was united in its support of Ali and the United States.

The moment that Costas described was one of many that Costas relived on that

University of Texas at Arlington stage that evening. From Michael Jordan’s legendary final shot in the 1998 NBA Finals to Derek Jeter’s dramatic final at-bat in Yankees Stadium in

2014, Costas’s recorded voice accompanied some of the most memorable moments in recent sports history, and Costas’s poetic descriptions of these moments are now part of their legacy. Jordan’s shot and Jeter’s walk-off single stay with us because sport reaches us in ways that other cultural objects do not. Sport is a drama without a script, and its spontaneity makes the drama more compelling to its audience. Sport unifies people behind a common cause of supporting a team even as it divides clan from clan. It can be shared across the generations from parent to child, and it cuts across lines of age, race, nationality, and culture.

Yet sport at times reflects or reinforces the national, racial, and class boundaries that exist in the culture at large.

In this project, I ask questions about the cultural boundaries that persist in the construction of American identities. Among those questions are: How does sport construct and reflect an American identity that constellates the diverse populations that reside within the geopolitical boundaries of the United States of America? How does sport help Americans navigate the divisions that exist within such an identity—namely, race, nation, and class?

How does contemporary literature reveal the tensions present in defining an American identity that is complicated by those divisions within our borders? The concepts of race, nation, and class are neither exhaustive nor discrete. On the contrary, they are entwined and incomplete. If American identity can ever be defined, such a definition would also be contingent on gender, sexuality, geography, economics, and empire; moreover, such a definition would be unfixed temporally. I do not attempt to create a definition of American identity through sports; rather, I argue that a cultural struggle over the definitions of

American identity is in fact the most consistent component of American identity, and that drawing boundaries has always been a part of that struggle. In short, the most “American”

things we can do are to contemplate, discuss, debate, and negotiate what it means to be

American. Part and parcel to those discussions has been a preoccupation with creating, supporting, and destroying boundaries of exclusion. On our way to determining what it means to be American, we have struggled to determine who “qualifies” as American. Sport renders these struggles visible, and the intersection of literature and sport crystallizes moments and places of conflict in which American identity politics play out on and around the field of play.

Identifying and constructing what it means to be an American is an enterprise that precedes the existence of the United States as a political entity. One of the central concerns of the American Revolution, from the American perspective, was the plausibility of uniting the colonies into one political entity against the British. Unity was vital in standing against the might of the British Empire, but the early American struggles to construct a federal government demonstrates that a cohesive structure was difficult to produce in peoples who felt connections at times to both their colonizers and to their discrete colonies. The ratification of the Articles of Confederation in 1781 gave the United States legitimacy in the international community, and it provided valuable tools for Americans to establish self-rule.

Moreover, the framers of the Articles—later to be branded “Antifederalists”—were, as

Donald Lutz demonstrates, “working from a coherent, positive view of politics that stressed liberty, popular sovereignty, majority rule, deliberative processes, localism, and a whole host of ideas and commitments central to what we would recognize as American political theory”

(55). According to Lutz, while the Articles are widely viewed as a failed attempt to create an effective American government, they in fact had a significant influence on the rule of law established in the Constitution of the United States (ibid).

The originally ratified U.S. Constitution tells an even clearer picture of the difficulties in establishing a national identity. With the Constitution came the “three-fifths compromise,” the nation took up, and in fact institutionalized, one of the questions that has been the among most problematic in the project of American identity-making: Who is included in, and who is left out of, this newly formed American identity? That particular piece of redacted constitutional law reads as follows:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several

States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective

Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free

Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding

Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. (US Const. Art. I, Sec. 2)

In this passage lives the unfortunate spirit of discrimination that pervades the national consciousness of the United States. The notion that southern states wanted to benefit in terms of congressional representation from their slave populations, despite withholding their unalienable rights, strikes the contemporary reader as a particularly crass and opportunistic maneuver. Moreover, the compromise blithely names Native Americans as excluded from the populations that would comprise the United States. The Articles of Confederation and the

U.S. Constitution both evince the notion that American national identity was very much under construction in the early United States, and the fact that this construction was troubled by the presence of African Americans and Native Americans, neither of whom fit neatly within those early notions of American identity.

Such questions—what is it to be an American, and who belongs in that conversation—pervade the oeuvre one of the foremost examples of purely American

literature, Walt Whitman. Critics have long named Whitman as a formative figure in the literary notions of American identity. As Roland Hagenbüchle argues, “for Walt Whitman, the tabula rasa quality of the United States affords ‘Modern Man’ the unique chance to re- create the world—a better world this time—thus offering him the privilege to assume in the creative act a new, properly speaking, American identity” (430). The clean-slate aspect of

American culture in which Whitman believes marks American identity as something that needs construction and identification. Moreover, Whitman speaks to “the division between whites and blacks” in America; according to Ed Folsom, Whitman “addressed [this division] with compassion but ultimately failed to address [it] forcefully when it became most pressing, in those first years after emancipation” (97). Dana Phillips has a similar reading of

Whitman’s racial dynamics, arguing “that Whitman’s racial politics are far more complicated, more conflicted, and considerably less admirable than his reputation for a broad and easy tolerance for others suggests” (290). Both Folsom and Phillips identify Whitman as a key figure in literary grappling with American identity, but as one who also fails to come to grips with the racial realities of early and postbellum America.

Folsom and Phillips point to a failure by Whitman to adequately address the divisions within the United States in spite of his apparent egalitarian messages. However, the notion that American writers had yet to confront these divisions rests on the failure to incorporate the minority voices in American literature that attacked this problem directly. William Apess had written a scathing critique of white American egocentrism in “An Indian’s Looking-

Glass for the White Man” in 1833, a generation before Whitman published Leaves of Grass.

Apess speaks to white America about its history of blaming Indians for American problems.

Apess states that he is “placing before you the black inconsistency that you place before

me—which is ten times blacker than any skin that you will find in the universe” (157). By calling out the hypocrisy of white American morality, Apess is an early demonstration of white authors’ inability to speak for the minority peoples they subjugate. Implicit in Apess’s eloquent critique is the reality that the conversation about American identity cannot be productive without the inclusion of Native Americans and African Americans, who had been systematically dissociated from the American dream.

Sports in America have often crystallized the nation’s complicated struggle with including subjugated peoples. From the origins of American horseracing and boxing in slave competition1 to the controversial careers of Jack Johnson and Jackie Robinson, African

American athletes have struggled for equality in professional sports at the highest levels while becoming the focal points for racial tensions of their day. Native Americans, meanwhile were not excluded from professional sports. Jimmy Claxton briefly was allowed to play professional baseball in 1916 until it was discovered that he had both black and

Native American ancestry. When Claxton was thought to be Native American, he was allowed to play, but when his black ancestry was revealed he was fired (Burns Baseball). The career of the most famous Native American professional athlete, Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox), demonstrates that Native Americans could enjoy competitive success in professional sports prior to Jackie Robinson.2 Thorpe learned baseball, football, and track and field while attending the Carlisle Indian School, one of many residential schools with a history of kidnapping, forced assimilation, denial of the children’s rights to their cultures and languages, and physical and sexual abuse of native children.3 In light of the circumstances of

1 See William Rhoden, Forty Million Dollar Slaves. 2 Importantly, Throrpe never found financial prosperity despite his impressive athletic achievements (Ahrenhoerster “White S(ox)”). 3 See for example Penelope Kelsey, “Narratives of the Boarding School Era from Victimry to Resistance.” 6

Thorpe’s training, his athletic success belies a legacy of discrimination and assimilation of

Native Americans. Institutions like Carlisle give credence to popular notions of U.S.-Native

American relations that tell a story of natives wanting separation rather than inclusion. For example, Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) expresses this sentiment in his landmark

1969 Custer Died For Your Sins when he writes, “What we need is a cultural leave-us alone agreement, in spirit and in fact” (27). Deloria goes on to argue that whites have systematically excluded African Americans while trying to force inclusion on Native

Americans (172). Both dynamics are harmful, but Deloria would note that they are nevertheless different.

In today’s culture, with overt racial and nationalist exclusion replaced by subtler forms of discrimination—and as popular culture begins to believe that the work of integrating professional sports has been completed—it becomes important to discuss the realities of class dynamics as a defining feature of the American identity reflected in our sports. What follows is a preview of this thesis’s exploration of American identity through sport, beginning with a fictional account of Native American identity through sport, then progressing to a dramatic (and partly historical) account of the effects of the color barrier in

Major League Baseball, and concluding with a discussion of class dynamics in American soccer fandom.

Chapter one, “United Loyalties,” exemplifies the interrelated nature of nation, race and class. I examine the function of basketball in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True

Diary of a Part-Time Indian in negotiating identity politics. Nation is at the forefront of my analysis, but race and class are inextricable from Alexie’s construction of Native American identity. The text’s protagonist, Arnold Spirit, Jr., more commonly known as Junior, is a

fourteen-year old Spokane Indian living in the town of Wellpinit, Washington, on the

Spokane Indian Reservation. After a white teacher warns Junior that staying on the reservation would eventually break Junior’s spirit, Junior transfers to Reardan High School in the nearby, predominately white town of Reardan. The tribal community in Wellpinit—a community which had never treated Junior particularly well—resents Junior’s decision to attend a white school. Even Junior’s best friend, Rowdy, feels betrayed by Junior and turns on him. Meanwhile, Junior is an outsider at his new school in Reardan, where the while kids react to him with curiosity, disdain, and condescension. Junior struggles to belong in

Reardan, but he eventually carves out a place in Reardan by his mastery on the basketball court.

Basketball allows Junior to express himself in a way that connects him to his Spokane upbringing. In addition to Scott Winkler’s observation that Alexie claims basketball as a native invention in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the recurrence of basketball across Alexie’s literary and cultural footprint (Lone Ranger and Tonto, Smoke

Signals, Diary, Alexie’s own Twitter feed) constructs basketball as a native sport. I argue that, through basketball, Junior navigates the two cultures of Wellpinit and Reardan in a way that allows him to develop both his Spokane and American identities. I work through the conceptual frameworks of Gerald Vizenor’s “survivance”—a neologism that combines survival with resistance, emphasizing native agency in the negotiation of multiple cultures— and Jace Weaver’s “communitism”—another neologism, this one combining community with activism, emphasizing the tribe’s centrality to native identity while figuring Vizenor’s

“resistance” as activism. Through the use of basketball’s physical, spatial, and competitive politics, Alexie constructs the reservation community as an oppressor which must be

escaped; yet a nuanced form of survivance prevails when Junior negotiates his escape through friendships that affirm tribal identity.

By beginning with Alexie’s complex treatment of tribal and American identities, I seek to disrupt notions of the American. I begin with a lens that has historically been figured variously as foreign, outsider, minority, or other. While Alexie’s native narrator finds discord between his native, tribal community and the white community he comes to inhabit, that discord is precisely what I figure as “American.” Alexie speaks to an American legacy of struggle between inclusion and exclusion that is metaphorized in the drama of American sports. Such a struggle is no more evident than in baseball’s history of exclusion of African

American ballplayers. Chapter two, “Telling Moments,” examines baseball’s history of racial segregation as told through August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning drama, Fences.

In Fences, the protagonist, Troy Maxson, is a former Negro League baseball player who never got a shot at playing in Major League Baseball (MLB). Wilson mixes the real- world history of Jackie Robinson’s integration of MLB in 1947 with a character in Troy

Maxson who tragically metaphorizes all the African American ballplayers who came before

Robinson and were left to look in on baseball’s integration from the outside. In the world of

Fences, Troy is a garbage collector who feels unjustly excluded from baseball’s top competition due to the racial discrimination of the past, and his antipathy toward American sport informs his troubled relationships with his sons and his wife.

Troy’s relationship to sport is informed by a construction of time and place in the text and in the paratextual world of MLB’s segregation history. In the real-world debate over segregation, MLB made arguments for segregation that invoked a dual sense of time that relied on kairos and chronos. Using Thomas Rickert’s reading of kairos as not only time-

focused but also situation- and audience-focued, I argue that the societal debates over race of the day forced MLB to effectively read kairos and intervene accordingly. Meanwhile, a look at the history of baseball’s segregation debate reveals that the substance of their argument relied on a chronos appeal that conceded the possibility of future integration while arguing that the present moment necessitated continued segregation. In short, MLB advanced an argument that the time was not yet right for integration because players, managers, and fans were not open-minded enough to accept black baseball players. As public opinion shifted toward a desire to integrate, MLB’s rhetoric of time came to be seen as a logical fallacy rather than as a cogent argument. This rhetoric of time makes its way into Wilson’s Fences. I argue through M.M. Bakhtin’s concept of the literary chronotope, the time-place constructed by a genre or text, that Fences displays a damaged sense of time-place informed by the discourse of timeliness through kairos and chronos in MLB’s real-world integration struggle.

Bakhtin’s chronotope is a loosely defined notion, so I construct a use of the chronotope that lends specificity and form to the concept. In the end, Troy and the generations of ballplayers he represents are left behind by the discourse of timeliness, and future generations, i.e. Troy’s sons, will be adversely affected by that discourse.

In the final chapter, “‘Bourgeois Nationalism,’” I engage class dynamics in a cultural studies approach to American sporting identity. I examine the growing prominence of soccer in American culture using Michael J. Agovino’s fan memoir, The Soccer Diaries, and

Franklin Foer’s creative nonfiction soccer book How Soccer Explains the World. Informed by the English history of soccer fandom revolving around discussions of fan decorum—that is, the backdrop of hooliganism—soccer in America catches on as a cultural activity of the intellectual elite. As a curiosity, or a sort of sporting utopia, soccer provides bourgeois sports

enthusiasts a game of their own, devoid of the cultural infrastructure surrounding baseball,

North American football, basketball, and hockey. Yet as the game grows in popularity, the cultural elite among American sports fans—what I call the “soccer intelligentsia,” or what

Foer calls the “soccer cognoscenti”—are joined by a class of fans more typically associated with American sport. What occurs is a narrative of “culture wars” identified by Foer (246) and commented on by Agovino. This class dynamic is informed by similar class tensions present in English football fandom prior to the popularization of soccer in the United States after the U.S. hosted the World Cup in 1994.

I bring to the discussion of soccer fandom in the United States the framework of

Pierre Bourdieu’s “distinction.” According to Bourdieu, a person’s class association, by virtue of his or her upbringing, education, and surroundings—the “habitus”—largely determines that person’s taste in cultural objects. Distinction works on the level of essentially every aesthetic choice, including the food one eats, the car one drives, the music, art, and literature one enjoys, and of course, the particular sports one decides to follow. Not only does class inform one’s decision to follow, for example, basketball instead of polo, it also determines the aesthetic value one brings in the appreciation of the game. Put simply, in terms of class distinction in soccer fandom, it matters not only that you follow soccer, but how you follow soccer. The case of American soccer fandom is a particularly intriguing example of class distinction because the nascence of professional soccer as a popular cultural form in the United States dictates that the success of the sport depends on the growth of the fanbase; therefore, no class of fan can be excluded, and the soccer intelligentsia finds a way to sit in the same stadium with the average fan who brings less cultural capital to the game, but just as much economic capital.

The popularity of international soccer—competitions between teams who represent nations (e.g. USA versus Belgium in the 2014 World Cup), as opposed to league or club soccer (e.g. Liverpool versus Manchester United)—brings together the two disparate classes of American soccer fans. I rework Foer’s term “bourgeois nationalism” to convey the way international soccer performs this union. Each World Cup has increased the popularity of soccer in the United States since USA ’94, and the rise of fan groups supporting the United

States Men’s National Team (USMNT) have functioned to increase fan participation and visibility. In essence, USMNT becomes a rallying point for many American soccer fans. The intellectualism and hipster appeal of soccer is bound to the nationalistic pride of the average

American through USMNT, and the team becomes a force for spreading the popularity of soccer in the United States. While club soccer may see these two classes of fans go their separate ways, the power of international soccer in bringing these two classes fans to the same games is seen in its ubiquitous media coverage. The soccer intellectuals have the talent and resources to provide internet and media coverage of international soccer, and the average fans provide the economic demand for that content. International soccer makes it trendy and cool to root for one’s country, while support for one’s country makes it increasingly popular to watch soccer.

Finally, sport provides spaces to unite as well as to reveal division, and this tendency is evident in each of the texts I examine. Without the sanctioned competition of the basketball court, Sherman Alexie’s narrator has no effective way of navigating the obstacle course of a liminal identity between nations. Without the venue of international soccer, the nascent soccer fandom of the United States would not enjoy the impressive growth rate that it has over the past twenty years. Yet, as Troy Maxson’s plight in Fences demonstrates, sport

can also serve to merely reflect the divided realities of American life. Jackie Robinson’s integration of MLB in 1947 tells a story of a society that struggled to overcome racial prejudice. Yet the fact that Robinson’s entree into MLB preceded much of the Civil Rights movement in the United States begs the question: to what extent does sport merely reflect

American identity and culture, and to what extent does sport inform and construct identity and culture?

If pure sport could exist—sport unfettered by cultural biases, racial privilege, or economic pressures—then it would truly allow for negotiation of nation, race, and class in a way that no other cultural form could. American sport, with its structured and organized competitive ethics, could allow for cultural exchange to take place fairly and with rules that place competitors on equal footing. However, sport is a cultural object, and as such it reflects the attitudes of its cultural context. It relies on rules written inside a culture, governing bodies made up of individuals raised by that culture, and in-game arbiters (referees and umpires) who are beholden to those rules and governing bodies. American sport will always reflect its context, and the battle over whom to include in the project of constructing American identity is part of that context. In the end, the playing field is only as level as we build it, and the lines are only as clear as we draw them. Between these lines, our American identities are revealed, constructed, and contested.

United Loyalties:

Basketball in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Terry looks out at me, pointing just inside the post as I was next. That roused the boys for a joke or two about goalies together. I lumbered in like some old woods horse deep in snow or a man balled up with the weight of the world. I knew what the trouble was, divided loyalties. I tried to blank out who’s in goal, with a chance to close the gap.

Did I mention they put four past me real quick? Undressed me in front of everyone I know.

After the game and half a dozen drinks we went out onto my ice—two goalies going fishing in the dark. “So where’s the lake?” he looks around, coming out of the woods, nothing but moonlight here, nothing but snow. “You’re standing on it,” I said. (Maggs 1-14)

The selection above comes from “Nothing but Moonlight Here,” from Night Work:

The Sawchuk Poems by Canadian poet Randall Maggs. The context of the collections makes it clear that the speaker is a goaltender playing in an exhibition game for the Corner Brook

All-Stars against the Boston Bruins. After getting shelled by Boston early, the Bruins’ legendary net minder Terry Sawchuk swaps sweaters with the speaker to stand in the line of fire and give the speaker the thrill of playing for the Bruins; thus, the “divided loyalties.” In the third stanza, the two goalies go ice fishing. The frozen lake mimics the arena’s playing surface, but the speaker’s emphasis (“my ice”) makes clear that in this space, the great Terry

Sawchuk and the goaltender of the small town team in Newfoundland can meet as equals and bond over being…what, exactly? Goaltenders? Canadians? Men?

The selection from The Sawchuk Poems shows an athlete conflicted between his individual success and the loyalty he feels to his team, and it shows him standing side-by- side with an opponent, exploring these feelings in spaces loaded with significance. In The

Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, the young narrator known as Junior (short for Arnold Spirit, Jr.) experiences divided loyalties that speak to the very core of his identity. Having decided, at the urging of a teacher, to leave his school on the

Spokane Indian Reservation to pursue the more favorable educational opportunities at

Reardan High School, Junior feels estranged from his tribal community and bereft of any true identity. “I always felt like a stranger,” Junior says. “I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all” (118). These feelings speak to common concerns of Native American literary criticism: tribal identity, native autonomy, and the perhaps hackneyed but inescapable notion of cultural hybridity. Native scholars have sought to navigate these issues with hermeneutics like Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishinaabe) “survivance” and “trickster hermeneutics” and Jace Weaver’s (Cherokee) “communitism.” With survivance, Vizenor breaks down the binary in Native American literary criticism between an insistence on resistant Indian nationalism and a surrender to assimilation or hybridity. With communitism,

Weaver asserts that an activist sense of community promotes tribal culture. In The Absolutely

True Diary, Junior finds a space common to both communities he inhabits—the basketball court—where he, like the speaker in Maggs’s poem, can contend with these issues while moving through contested spaces. I argue that Alexie uses basketball, through its physical, competitive, and spatial politics, to engage with communitism and push the limits of survivance. Ultimately the concepts have room for Alexie, but Alexie pushes them to constitute identities and communities that fall outside the categories allowed by today’s

Native American literary conversations. Alexie pushes by constructing the reservation community in Diary as an oppressive place which must be escaped; yet a nuanced form of

survivance prevails when Junior negotiates his escape through friendships that affirm tribal identity.

Native American identity is a vital part of examining the way American identity is constructed through sports. As noted in the introduction, even pre-revolution Americans struggled to cope with how to share a continent with Native Americans. The bloody and troubled history of U.S.-native relations is an unfortunate and fundamental part of the construction of American identity. From James Fennimore Cooper to Johnny Depp,

American culture has shown Native Americans walking side-by-side with white Americans, and it has often done so through the lens of white voices. Since the 1960s, native voices have been recognized and foregrounded in Native American studies, and thus a more honest conversation about American identity has emerged. By placing Alexie at the beginning of this analysis, the exclusionary construction of American identity is exposed. Junior earns his way into the microcosm of white America represented by the town of Reardan, and thus his small struggle demonstrates the larger cultural fight for native peoples and voices to be counted among the American identity constructed through sport.

Contested Spaces

Once Junior leaves his school in Wellpinit to attend Reardan, he begins a school year in which he will spend most of his time moving through contested spaces. The first sign that

Junior’s moves will be contested is a warning from his parents when he tells them of his desire to change schools. “‘It’s going to be hard to get you to Reardan,’ Dad said. ‘We can’t afford to move there. And there ain’t no school bus going to come out here’” (47). So logistically Junior will face resistance to his departure, but Junior’s mother articulates the ideological resistance that will come from the reservation community: “You’ll be the first

one to ever leave the rez this way…The Indians around here are going to be angry with you”

(47).

Christopher Taylor, in arguing for a view of North American literature as a “contact zone” and a “field of overlapping sovereignties” (“North America as Contact Zone” 26), observes that in Alexie’s 1995 novel Reservation Blues, “the reservation remains a safe place to which the characters can return for emotional and spiritual...solace” (41). The reservation as a place of safe retreat may have been a valid construction for Junior prior to his decision to go to Reardan; for example, Junior fondly recalls experiences climbing trees and swimming with his best friend Rowdy in a passage that describes the natural landscapes of the Spokane

Reservation as a pastoral retreat (219-20). However, the idea of reservation as retreat is illusory; as Junior reminds his readers, “Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know?

Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear”

(216). Moreover, Junior’s decision will be viewed as betrayal by his reservation community.

Junior tells Rowdy of his decision to go to Reardan, Rowdy punches Junior in the face in anger, and the accompanying illustration shows Rowdy shouting “I HATE YOU!,” “YOU

SUCK!,” and “YOU WHITE LOVER!” (53). The reservation will now be a place where such hostile sentiments are felt for Junior, and the expression of them by his best friend illustrates the expected reactions from the larger reservation community.

The Spokanes view Reardan as a symbol of an oppressive culture, and Junior demonstrates this view by cataloguing the dominance of Reardan over Wellpinit in sports.

Last year, during eighth grade, we traveled to Reardan to play them in flag

football. Rowdy was our star quarterback and kicker and middle linebacker,

and I was the loser water boy, and we lost to Reardan by the score of 45-0.

Of course, losing isn’t exactly fun.

Nobody wants to be a loser.

We all got really mad and vowed to kick their asses the next game.

But, two weeks after that, Reardan came to the rez and beat us 56-10.

During basketball season, Reardan beat us 72-45 and 56-50, our only two

losses of the season.

Rowdy scored twenty-four points in the first game and forty in the second

game.

I scored nine points in each game, going 3 for 10 on three-pointers in the

first game and 3 for 15 in the second. Those were my two worst games of the

season. (49-50)

Junior goes on to describe blowout losses in baseball and even an academic competition.

Reardan dominates in every organized competition against Wellpinit; the only time Wellpinit even came close to winning was the 56-50 loss in basketball.

With baseball and football, the dominance is to be expected due to legacy of those sports in Indian boarding schools. As Greg Ahrenhoerster observes, “football and baseball are particularly powerful symbols [of colonialism] because of their association with the boarding schools that young Native Americans were forced to attend in the early part of the twentieth century… At these schools, the young boys were often forced to play both baseball and football” (“White S(ox)” 54)4. So Wellpinit’s lack of success at these sports could be a result of less interest in these sports loaded with colonial legacy.

4 Sac and Fox athlete Jim Thorpe attended Carlisle Indian School where he competed in baseball, football, and track and field. He went on to win gold medals in the decathlon pentathlon in the 1912 Olympic Games and eventually played both baseball and football professionally. See for example Jeffrey Powers-Beck. 18

However, the dominance of Reardan over Wellpinit on the basketball court is especially meaningful. As Scott Winkler notes, “several characters” in Alexie’s short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven “claim basketball wasn’t created by James Naismith, but by Indians” (“Dreams Like Baseball Cards” 93). The claiming of basketball by white America is, Winkler argues, “a symbolic example of Euramerican seizure of Indian land and culture” (“Dreams” 93). Critical readings of basketball’s role in Alexie’s fiction harmonize with Winkler’s framing of basketball as a native form of expression. David

Goldstein, for example, argues in “Sacred Hoop Dreams” that “Alexie uses basketball to explore the ironies of American Indian reservation life and the tensions between traditional lifeways and contemporary social realities” (“Sacred Hoop Dreams” 77). Ahrenhoerster argues in “White S(ox)” that Alexie and James Welch (Blackfeet/Gros Ventre) “have found that the best way to explain the tragedy and success, sorrow and joy of the Native American people is through…hero-traitor sportsmen and women” (61); Ahrenhoerster argues in “Karl

Marx” that Alexie’s characters use basketball as a substitute for alcohol addictions that seek

“to ease the tremendous pain of the hopelessness and despair that fills their daily lives” (133).

For Winkler, though, basketball “fails to function as a productive venue for the construction of identity or the exercise of meaningful agency” in Alexie’s works.

Goldstein, Ahrenhoerster, and Winkler have considered the use of basketball in

Alexie’s works as an expression of (or in Winkler’s case, a failure to express) identity and improvement of life on the reservation. What these scholars do not consider is how

basketball allows Junior to negotiate literal moves between the reservation and non- reservation communities he inhabits.5

The Rules of the Game

When Junior first arrives at Reardan, he encounters sadly predictable racism from his new classmates. After a shockingly inflammatory joke from “Roger the Giant,” the most popular kid in the school, Junior reacts the only way he knows how, by punching Roger in the face. The bystanders react with shock, as though Junior has violated some tacit law. The confusion results from Junior’s unfamiliarity with the structures of the cultural space. In

Reardan, insults are acceptable, but physical violence is not. Back in Wellpinit, violence is expected as a reaction to insults. Junior helpfully lists the “Unofficial and

Unwritten…Spokane Indian Rules of Fisticuffs,” the first of which is “if somebody insults you, then you have to fight him” (61). The punch from Junior is an attempt to contest the space, to bring his culturally learned right to violence, in order to claim a space within this new culture wherein Junior will not himself be contested by racist slurs and jokes.

In this scenario, Junior’s actions are greeted with fear but ultimately achieve his goals. The next violent encounter, though, earns Junior an even greater measure of respect and acceptance into the Reardan community. Junior tries out for the basketball team, expecting to make the Junior Varsity at best, and is forced to compete against Roger one-on- one. Junior describes his encounter:

He bumped me, pushed me, and elbowed me, but I stayed with him. He

went up for a layup and I fouled him. But I’d learned there are NO FOULS

5 Ahrenhoerster and Winkler have only focused on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, so this dynamic would not have applied to their studies. Goldstein considers Diary but strictly in conversation with several of Alexie’s other works and thus had limited space for a consideration of Diary. 20

CALLED IN FULL-COURT ONE-ON-ONE, so I grabbed the loose ball and

raced for my end again.

But Coach blew the whistle.

“All right, all right, Arnold, Roger,” Coach said. “That’s good, that’s

good. Next two, next two.”

I took my place at the back of the line and Roger stood next to me.

“Good job,” he said and offered his fist. (141)

Here on the basketball court, unlike in the schoolyard, the physical confrontation is sanctioned. Thomas McLaughlin demonstrates in “Man to Man: Basketball, Movement, and the Practice of Masculinity” that basketball’s defined and “highly oriented space” (174) allow for “a form of ritualized…violence” (182).6

But more than just allowing violence, the sport codes the types of violence available and places them in an ethics of competition. “The contest requires not just force but insider knowledge of the precise patterns and possibilities available in the game situation, and the combination of physical struggle and intellectual strategy constitutes the unique pleasure of the game” (McLaughlin 183). Junior is able to understand the politics of the space. The structured space of the basketball court sanctions the violent act even while punishing it by defining the action as a foul; yet the less structured nature of full-court one-on-one condones the foul. Junior is able to use the spatial and bodily rhetoric of the encounter; to take advantage of the opportune moment in what Debra Hawhee calls a “bodily kairos” (71), one which combines arete, skill and artistry invested with honor, and agon, the competitive encounter (Bodily Arts 18).

6 The ellipsis here omits the word “civilized.” McLaughlin focuses on gender and is not racially, ethnically, or nationally specific; thus the word does not carry the assimilationist connotations in McLaughlin’s study that it would here in a specifically Native American context. 21

By mastering the rhetorical space of the basketball tryout, Junior is able to belong in the contested space of the Reardan community; but his performance in the basketball tryout enacts the strategies of Vizenor’s “survivance.” Survivance—an active, resistant presence— seeks to bridge the divide between polar positions in Native American literary criticism: nationalism and hybridity/cosmopolitanism.7 Vizenor argues that nationalism, on the one hand, “is the most monotonous simulation of dominance in first person pronouns of tribal consciousness” (Manifest Manners 60) but that focus on hybridity (or Native Americans grappling with living between cultures) errs by inviting victimization; “nostalgia is the absence of the real,” Vizenor argues, “not the presence of imagination and the wild seasons of peace” (Manifest Manners 25). Survivance in Native American literature, then, subverts these problematic approaches. As Vizenor writes, “the wild incursions of the warriors of survivance undermine the simulations of the unreal in the literature of dominance” (Manifest

Manners 12).

Junior’s Strategies of Survivance

After the above excerpt from Diary, which ended with Roger offering his fist as a signal of respect to Junior, Junior responds: “I bumped his fist with mine. I was a warrior!”

(141). So we might ask at this point, how was Junior a warrior? Vizenor offers several examples and strategies of survivance. I offer that Junior takes on the role of the trickster, a celebrated trope of Vizenor’s postindian warriors of survivance. Vizenor calls “the trickster hermeneutics of liberation” one of the “postmodern conditions in the critical responses to

Native American Indian and postindian literature” (66). Vizenor describes the “trickster hermeneutics of liberation” as “the uncertain humor and shimmer of survivance that denies

7 This debate plays out publicly in Craig S. Womack’s “The Integrity of American Indian Claims: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Hybridity” in American Indian Literary Nationalism, eds. Jace Weaver, Craig S. Womack, and Robert Warrior. 22

the obscure maneuvers of manifest manners, tragic transvaluations, and the incoherence of cultural representations” (66). Junior creates a “shimmer of survivance” when he succeeds in his basketball tryout, exceeding his professed expectations by making the varsity team.

Junior infiltrates a white institution—the Reardan basketball team—by feigning lack of skill, thereby playing the trickster. To the reader, Junior exaggerates his stature to seem like the underdog; to the school’s white population, he perhaps allows himself to be defeated by

Roger in the early stage of the competition before eventually defeating his opponent. Junior controls the situation and undermines the colonial domination of Reardan over Wellpinit, as signaled by the lopsided sporting victories for Reardan. Junior as a representative of the

Spokanes in the Reardan institution carries out the new narratives that Vizenor celebrates:

“the postindian turns in literature, the later indication of new narratives, are an invitation to the closure of dominance in the ruins of representation. The invitation uncovers traces of tribal survivance, trickster hermeneutics, and the remanence of intransitive shadows”

(Manifest Manners 62).

Junior’s physical confrontations that earn his place in Reardan’s society can be read as practicing another strategy of survivance, that of adapting and performing a tribal practice just well enough to function. Kenneth Roemer interprets this adaptation as the performance of “making-do ceremonies,” which Roemer argues “represent the survival of tribal concepts, stories, rituals, and skills modified to meet changing circumstances and to reflect the particular presence or absence of traditional knowledge and skills of the performers”

(“Making Do” 80). By starting (or perhaps more accurately, finishing) the brief schoolyard brawl with Roger, Junior is enacting a tribal concept, the fistfight, which borders on ritualistic due to the frequency with which it occurs; Junior says first that he had been in

“dozens” of fights, then hyperbolically enumerates his fighting record as “five wins and one hundred and twelve losses” (62). The ritual takes his tribal practice and adapts it to his paltry skill level, but Junior performs just well enough, landing the only punch thrown in the fight, for his ritual to work.

Moreover, the basketball tryout is an expression of a tribal ritual. As previously noted, basketball is constructed as a native form of competition, and he plays it in the way that he has practiced before. Junior’s effectiveness as a basketball player is his ability as a jump-shooter (as opposed to an inside scorer), and he modifies his game to the one-on-one situation of the tryout. Junior forgoes dribbling and instead simply runs the ball down the court “like a fullback” (141). This style would not be permitted in official competition, but the situation demands adaptation since Junior’s prior attempt to beat Roger off the dribble resulted in being knocked to the floor. Junior instead runs down the floor, stops, and makes the familiar jump-shot. The offensive sequence is unorthodox, but it does the job. Junior takes a ritual—not one that many would describe as traditional, but one that reflects Junior’s knowledge and experience of his Spokane culture—and performs it well enough, given adverse circumstances, to show himself capable of playing on the varsity team.

Testing Boundaries and the Limits of “Survivance”

We see that Junior has moved through contested space, played the trickster, and performed “making-do ceremonies” in order to gain acceptance into his adopted non-native society. However, we must consider the following: what exactly does Junior succeed in doing, and can this be considered survivance? He has, by this point, merely succeeded in turning Reardan into an uncontested space, but the space in his home reservation, and the

road back to it, has become increasingly contested. Each step into Reardan is one step away from Wellpinit, and culturally returning becomes ever more difficult for Junior.

Junior’s bus ride from Wellpinit to Reardan expresses the increasing cultural estrangement Junior feels from his home community. Two weeks after Junior makes the team at Reardan, the team travels to Wellpinit to play against Rowdy’s team. Junior expresses the bizarness of being literally a visitor (i.e., a member of the “visiting team”) in his own home town: “the morning of the game, I’d woken up in my rez house, so my Dad could drive me the twenty-two miles to Reardan, so I could get on the team bus for the ride back to the reservation. Crazy” (142). If the symbolism of that departure and return were lost on Junior, the reservation community stands ready to remind him. On the bus ride in, Junior observes:

“we were greeted by some rabid elementary school kids. Some of those little dudes and dudettes were my cousins.8 They pelted our bus with snowballs. And some of those snowballs were filled with rocks” (143). While the children might target the Reardan bus even without Junior’s presence on the team, the inclusion of his cousins tells Junior that the children feel a personal antagonism. That sentiment is confirmed when the bus reaches its destination:

As we got off the bus and walked toward the gym, I could hear the crowd

going crazy inside.

They were chanting something.

I couldn’t make it out.

And then I could.

8 While Junior implies that some of the children are his relatives, his use of cousin also evokes the colloquial use of “cousin” between Native Americans. As the anonymous narrator of Alexie’s “The Toughest Indian in the World” says, “Indians always call each other cousin, especially if they’re strangers” (The Toughest Indian in the World 30).

The rez basketball fans were chanting, “Ar-nold sucks! Ar-nold sucks!”

They weren’t calling me by my rez name, Junior. Nope, they were calling

me by my Reardan name. (143)

The use of Junior’s “Reardan name” is significant in the play of survivance in the text.

Vizenor argues that “nicknames…are tribal stories that are heard and remembered as survivance” (59). The practice of translating a native nickname in to a surname, for Vizenor, erodes native agency and autonomy; such translation is “the closure of tribal stories and the remembrance of communities…translated names are misconstrued identities in the literature of dominance” (59).

The Reardan community had to this point refused to use the nickname Junior and instead called him Arnold. On Junior’s first day at Reardan, his new classmates react to his name. When he introduces himself as Junior, the students laugh at hearing it. “They were laughing at my name,” Junior says. “I had no idea that Junior was a weird name. It’s a common name on my rez, on any rez. You walk into any trading post on any rez in the

United States and shout, ‘Hey Junior!’ and seventeen guys will turn around. And three women” (60). The teacher then takes roll and calls out “Arnold Spirit,” what Junior refers to as his “name name” (60). He then attempts to explain to the nearby girl, Penelope, that he is both Junior and Arnold. The explanation does not seem to land, though, as Junior’s encounter with Penelope a week later shows Junior reminding her of his name:

“I’m Junior,” I said. “I mean, I’m Arnold.”

“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “You’re the boy who can’t figure out his own

name.” (73)

Penelope, and by extension the Reardan community, insist on using “Arnold,”9 and by doing so mark clearly that Junior will have a different identity in Reardan. The Wellpinit community repeats this name back to Junior, implying that Junior has perhaps gone over; as

Junior explains to his friend Gordy, a Reardan classmate, “some Indians think you become white if you try to make your life better, if you become successful” (131). The Spokanes parrot back the assimilative appellation used by his new Reardan community, suggesting in no uncertain terms that the teenager getting off the Reardan bus is no longer a Spokane

Indian.

The incident on the bus ride, with children hurling rocks at the team bus, and the

Wellpinit fans’ mocking of Junior using his “Reardan name” shows that Junior is not welcome as part of the Reardan team. The opposition of the Wellpinit fans spills out from the crowd onto the space of play, when fans deny Junior entry to the game by throwing a quarter onto the court. The projectile hits Junior, drawing blood from his forehead. Most basketball leagues prohibit players remaining on the court if they are bleeding, and Junior is forced to leave the floor before ever getting into the game. Back in the locker room, Junior gets three stitches in his forehead before being allowed to return. The fact that the fans interfere with the game shows that the boundaries marking the space of play are, even if precisely drawn, illusory. McLaughlin notes that basketball’s boundaries “define not only where the players can go, but also where those who are not players cannot go” (173). Yet the fans have transgressed the boundaries.

Transgression of sport’s marked boundaries can have disastrous effects; an incident during an NBA game held in Detroit in 2004 demonstrates the importance of preserving

9 Interestingly, Junior gets someone else’s name wrong in the text. When Junior lists his favorite basketball players, he lists “Dwayne Wade” as his favorite (178). The guard for the Miami Heat is actually Dwyane Wade, not “Dwayne.” 27

boundaries. Daniel Grano studies the incident, in which fights erupted between players and fans, in “Ritual Disorder and the Contractual Morality of Sport.” The incident began with a fight between players but intensified when a fan threw a beverage at Indiana Pacers player

Ron Artest.10 Artest then went into the stands to attack a fan whom Artest misidentified as the thrower. Grano argues that enforcing boundaries is vitally important: “because sports rituals construct playing courts and fields as separated spaces that enclose acceptable acts of violence, the stakes for ritualistically maintaining problematic divisions between civil and untamed spaces and people are particularly high” (462). Moreover, Grano argues that the incident had racial implications as well; according to Grano, “the race and class identity gap between fans [of whom a majority are white] and players [of whom a majority are black] was an overarching theme throughout responses to the brawl” (455). Such an “identity gap” is present between the Native American fans on Wellpinit and the mostly white, wealthier

Reardan players, and the fans’ perception of Junior as a traitor aligns him with the latter.

The thrown quarter in Diary does not result in a chaotic scene like the one in Detroit in 2004. While Junior does react to the crowd’s attack—“bleeding and angry, I glared at the crowd”—but does not lash out physically or transgress the boundaries of the game (145). The boundaries are preserved when Junior retreats to the locker room. However, when Junior returns to the game, he finds violence directed at him from within the boundaries. Sent into a tie game, Junior steps into the heated competition:

I immediately stole a pass and drove for a layup.

Rowdy was right behind me.

10 Ron Artest has since legally changed his name to Metta World Peace. 28

I jumped into the air, heard the curses of two hundred Spokanes, and then

saw only a bright light as Rowdy smashed his elbow into my head and

knocked me unconscious.

Okay, I don’t remember anything else from that night. So everything I tell

you now is secondhand information.

After Rowdy knocked me out, both of our teams got into a series of

shoving matches and push-fights.

The tribal cops had to pull twenty or thirty adult Spokanes off the court

before any of them assaulted a teenage white kid.

Rowdy was given a technical foul. (146)

The chaotic scene here results in fans entering the space of play to fight the players from

Reardan, but unlike the events in the 2004 NBA game, none of the Reardan players bears responsibility by transgressing the boundaries of play. Yet from the Spokanes’ point of view,

Junior has done exactly that by leaving the reservation and coming back with the Reardan team. This is a physical expression that Junior is free to leave, but his return will be resisted.

Eventually a rematch between the two teams takes place in Reardan, and Junior becomes a hero to his adopted Reardan community and gets revenge for the violence committed against him by the fans and by Rowdy. Junior bests Rowdy on the defensive end and makes one memorable shot that Junior feels provided an emotional surge for his team.11

However, the victory is unsatisfying for Junior, who now feels that he has betrayed his community:

11 Peter Donahue in “New Warriors” and Greg Ahrenhoerster in “White S(ox)” have emphasized that Alexie demonstrates a native aesthetic of sport that emphasizes experiences, moments, and memories rather than scores or statistics. Junior’s statline in the Wellpinit-Reardan rematch is not spectacular, but in keeping with this aesthetic he does play spectacularly in moments. 29

We had defeated the enemy! We had defeated the champions! We were

David who’d thrown a stone into the brain of Goliath!

And then I realized something.

I realized that my team, the Reardan Indians, was Goliath. (195)

It is in this moment that we see that Reardan-Wellpinit basketball rivalry synecdochically renders the larger dynamics of the Spokane Reservation’s relationship to the nearby Reardan community. Junior’s desire to inhabit both the reservation and the non-reservation communities, having estranged him from the former, makes us question whether or not survivance from Junior will come at the cost of defeating his own people.

Communitism, Reconciliation, and the Competitive Fallacy

Junior’s strained relationship to community engages with and problematizes the scholarship in Native American literature that emphasizes tribalism, or in Weaver’s parlance,

“communitism” (That the People Might Live). Weaver argues that “the single thing that most defines Indian literatures relates to [a] sense of community and commitment to it” (43).

Weaver specifically asserts that “to promote communitist values means to participate in the healing of the grief and sense of exile felt by Native communities and the pained individuals in them” (43). Junior certainly feels a sense of exile, but his exile is from his community.

That exile is the central conflict of Diary, and it would certainly seem to argue against communitism. The community is a source of pain for Junior, even before his estrangement from it; Junior’s small stature, the brain damage (hydrocephalus) he suffered at birth, and his speech impediments make him a target for vicious bullying, and he fears going to the

Spokane powwow for fear of being harassed—a fear that is justified when the Andruss brothers, thirty-year old triplets, attack him. Moreover, the text’s escapism narrative, as set

up by Junior’s teachers’ plea early in the text for Junior to leave the reservation, ostensibly constructs the community as antagonist.

However, the text refuses a simple opposition to communitism as well. Weaver describes his vision of literature that is not communitistic: “Not to be committed to Native

American community, affirming the tribes, the people, the values, is tantamount to psychic suicide. It is to lose the self in the dominant mass humanity, either ceasing to be or persisting merely as another minority, drifting with no place, no relations, no real people” (43). Alexie certainly is not guilty of this sin. While he may view the community as, at times, harmful to the hopes and dreams of his young narrator, he certainly displays a value for community even as he mourns the loss of it. Neither is the loss of community complete in the text. Junior’s continued connection to the community is demonstrated after Junior’s grandmother dies: “I was still a part of the rez. People [on the reservation] had either ignored me or called me names or pushed me. But they stopped after my grandmother died…No matter what else happened between my tribe and me, I would always love them for giving me peace on the day of my grandmother’s funeral. Even Rowdy just stood far away” (160).

Rowdy’s compassion in the time of Junior’s grief notably signals Junior’s most powerful connection to community, his fractured friendship with Rowdy. The loss of

Rowdy’s friendship throughout most of the text is Junior’s most acutely felt disconnection from his reservation community, and basketball plays a pivotal role in their eventual reconciliation in the text’s final scene. Basketball provides several things for the scene of reconciliation: a physical location in which to reunite, an activity that subordinates conversation between the two, and a powerfully evocative enactment of much of their past friendship. Thus, basketball functions, as Winkler argues, as a “bricoleur…bridging the gap

between whatever poles create the anxiety brought to bear upon” the characters involved

(“Dreams” 93). After Junior reminisces about some of the times that he and Rowdy explored the reservation together, Rowdy unexpectedly shows up at Junior’s house claiming boredom as his reason for seeking Junior’s company, and the basketball game is set up.

“I thought you hated me,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “But I’m bored.”

“So what?”

“So you want to maybe shoot some hoops?”

For a second, I thought about saying no. I thought about telling him to bite

my ass. I thought about making him apologize. But I couldn’t. He was never

going to change.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We walked over the courts behind the high school.

Two old hoops with chain nets.

We shot lazy jumpers for a few minutes. We didn’t talk. Didn’t need to

talk. We were basketball twins.

Of course, Rowdy got hot, hit fifteen or twenty in a row, and I rebounded

and kept passing the ball to him.

Then I got hot, hit twenty-one in a row, and Rowdy rebounded for me.

“You want to go one-on-one?” Rowdy asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve never beaten me one-on-one,” he said. “You pussy.”

“Yeah, that’s going to change.”

“Not today,” he said.

“Maybe not today,” I said. “But someday.”

“Your ball,” he said and passed it to me.

I spun the rock in my hands. (228)

Here, basketball allows Junior and Rowdy to meet and work through their differences.

Following this exchange is Rowdy’s most powerful moment in the text, in which he overcomes the wounds of abandonment inflicted by his best friend and expresses pride and support. Rather than characterizing Junior’s decision to leave the reservation school the way he and the rest of the Wellpinit community had throughout the novel—as a decision to abandon his people and aspire to whiteness—Rowdy instead sees the decision as an enactment of a lost way of life of Native Americans: “I was reading this book about old-time

Indians, about how we used to be nomadic…the thing is, I don’t think Indians are nomadic anymore. Most Indians, anyway” (229). Rowdy shows a nuanced understanding of the predicament of the Spokane tribal reality: that the reservation has somehow gotten it wrong.

Despite its depth of community and tribal identity for the Spokanes, the reservation has somehow turned its people into different people than they once were; thus, leaving the reservation, for Junior, is not a denial of his Spokane identity or an embracing of white culture, but rather a painfully difficult and, from all sides, a resisted rejection of the hegemonic definition of tribal authenticity and identity as derived from loyalty to the reservation.

It is in this dynamic—in which Junior strives to find an Indian and tribal identity by looking outside the tribe—that we see Alexie picking at the seams of Vizenor’s survivance.

While the construction is uniquely powerful for dismantling assimilationist rhetoric, it can at times appear abstract or even relative. Junior can be seen as practicing survivance by finding a space in Reardan—the basketball court—in which to assert a resistive, native presence. Yet the escape into Reardan can still be constructed as loss, as Junior poignantly muses: “I would always love and miss my reservation and my tribe. I hoped and prayed that they would someday forgive me for leaving them. I hoped and prayed that I would someday forgive myself for leaving them” (230). Meanwhile, the reservation community can be viewed as asserting their own ways of life over the values of success and wealth held by the non-native community; yet by doing so they alienate one of their own and deepen the cycle of domination and death that plagues the reservation.

Most importantly for the final, conciliatory scene between Junior and Rowdy, basketball becomes non-competitive, and the value of victory is powerfully subverted.

Ahrenhoerster, discussing a short story by Jack Forbes in which one team schemes to win by forcing a forfeit, discusses the way the Native American characters in Forbes’s story adopt a

“white ‘win at all costs’ mentality. It is significant that [Forbes’s] players never even get to play the game—the whole point from the traditional Native standpoint—and are simply awarded the end-result, the win” (57). Thomas McLaughlin asserts that non-competitive sport has a sort of pure value separate from competitive sport: “Think of a couple of kids shooting baskets in a driveway, or a game at a family picnic, or a single person shooting around—in some of these situations the competitive factor comes down near zero. And who is to say that the more competitive games are closer to the essence of the sport?” (185).

McLaughlin even recalls such a pure experience of sport present in his own competitive games: “half an hour after the game, I would be hard pressed to remember who won. What I

remember are plays that were satisfying or frustrating, moments of pleasure and shared spirit” (185).

Junior and Rowdy’s final game in the text embodies exactly that spirit. After

Rowdy’s pronouncement that his people have lost their nomadic way of life, he asserts that

Junior is reclaiming that lifestyle: “You’re an old-time nomad,” he tells Junior. “You’re going to keep moving all over the world in search of food and water and grazing land. That’s pretty cool” (230). Rowdy finally constructs Junior’s departure, and indeed his survivance, not as a victory achieved by escape; but an ongoing struggle. The journey, as opposed to the destination—that is, the game, not the victory or defeat—is what matters. And finally, as if to give physical, cathartic expression to this sentiment: “Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours. We played until dark. We played until the streetlights lit up the court. We played until the bats swooped down at our heads. We played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the dark sky. We didn’t keep score” (230).

As Tom Farrington points out in “The Ghost Dance and the Politics of Exclusion,” most of the scholarship on Alexie’s fiction focuses on the issue of “cultural authenticity”

(521). “The majority of these criticisms,” Farrington says, “fall into one of two categories: those who condemn the author’s prose for trafficking moribund Indian stereotypes, and those who defend his commitment to realistic portrayals of a struggling reservation community”

(521). Alexie himself dismisses the criticism, claiming that the “stereotypes” referenced are in fact a reflection of the reality Alexie has seen. As Alexie says to Åse Nygren,

I write autobiographically, so when you talk about surviving pain and trauma

and getting out of it—I did, I have! But the people I know have not. So what

do I do in my literature? Do I portray the Indian world as I see it? And I do

see it as doomed, and that you have to get lucky to escape that. Should I write

the literature of hope no matter how I feel? No! I’m not hopeful. So how do

you avoid victimization? We can’t. We are victims. (“World of Story-Smoke”

156)

Pressed on the point of whether Vizenor’s “survivance” can help turn the conversation away from victimization, Alexie expresses doubt: “survival is a low hope. I don’t want just survival, or ‘survivance.’ I want triumph! But you don’t get it” (156).

Yet even as Alexie dismisses the concept, the concept makes space for Alexie.

Junior’s conflicts with his tribe over the perception of tribal betrayal and cultural assimilation push at the limits of survivance. If the tribe must be abandoned in order for the individual to thrive, what value remains to the tribe? However, Junior shows that the power of the

Spokane tribe in guiding Junior’s identity persists; the community remains invaluable by soothing Junior’s grief, by telling him how he can fit into the world, and by giving him a reason to pursue triumph. Moreover, the concept of survivance aptly describes the way that

Junior and Rowdy adapt their own friendship to suit the needs of the two boys. They find a space—the basketball court—and use its rhetoric—ritualized violence, and the competitive encounter—to work through their conflict and arrive at a position of cooperation; they no longer keep score.

By negotiating the two cultures of Diary, Junior shows that a cohesive definition of what it means to be American always reveals divisions. The reservation America calls into question the national unity of the peoples within the geographical boundaries of the United

States. While it is tempting to view Junior’s journeys as indicative of his ability to be included in both American and Spokane national cultures, the reality Junior reveals is

division along national, racial, and economic lines, and his navigation of this division is perhaps the most American enterprise that Junior can undertake.

The game of basketball is vital to guiding Junior through the contested space of the text. Earlier, I referenced McLaughlin’s comment that basketball’s boundaries “define not only where the players can go, but also where those who are not players cannot go” (173).

The court miniaturizes Eastern Washington for Junior; everywhere are lines drawn, and everywhere are people telling Junior that he is not a player who can cross those lines. Yet on the court Junior is able to belong and assert his presence, and by doing so, the presence of his tribe. This is survivance at its most complicated, most defiant. Even as forces both inside and outside the tribe leave Sherman Alexie with no hope, his own narrator boldly asserts that they are still stubbornly here, suffering and struggling and boldly wanting more.

Telling Moments:

The Kairos of Baseball’s Segregation and the Chronotopes of August Wilson’s Fences

In the previous chapter, Sherman Alexie’s narrator used the basketball court to assert his identity in two communities that resisted his presence. The basketball court acts as a place that comes loaded with important personal, developmental, racial, and tribal meanings, and successful mastery of that place gives the narrator agency and sovereignty. I now shift to a new time and place, focusing on the real world integration of Major League Baseball in 1947

Brooklyn and the dramatic expression of its aftermath in the late-1950s Pittsburgh of August

Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, Fences (1983). To examine Fences, I make a few assertions: first, that baseball’s desegregation by Jackie Robinson in 1947 is told through a narrative of societal progress and personal triumph that erases the stories of the black ballplayers left behind; second, that the play’s depiction of fictional former baseball player

Troy Maxson, who plied his craft in the Negro Leagues, places him in conversation with the

Jackie Robinson integration narrative; and third, that time, in the play as well as in baseball’s history, is a contested site of oppression, liberation, division, and unity. Time becomes a significant factor in the play’s use of baseball as both symbol and material—that is, as an avatar of American identity and a locus of racial and generational conflict. The impact of time on Wilson’s use of baseball will dominate the discussion here, but time is entwined with place, person, and situation. Thus, I will use two context-rich constructions of time in my analysis. First, kairos12 will guide my analysis of the real-world events leading to Jackie

Robinson’s breaking of the color line in Major League Baseball (MLB). Kairos becomes not only the opportune moment in which the rhetor intervenes, but a sustained cultural moment

12 In particular, I will be taking Thomas Rickert’s reading of kairos as material, contextual, and attuned to audience. See Rickert’s Ambient Rhetoric. 38

in which the public calls for discourse around the issue of racial discrimination in MLB. The discourse became about timeliness itself; proponents of segregation argued that society was not yet ready for integration, while proponents of integration argued that society was ready for black ballplayers in MLB and in fact demanded their inclusion. Second, M.M. Bakhtin’s chronotope, or time-place, will guide my reading of Fences. In Fences, the melancholy and trauma in Troy’s life reveals that Troy has been left behind by MLB’s integration saga and its discourse of timeliness; the play is left with a damaged sense of time-place that forgets

Troy’s generation and infects the generation of his sons. By discussing MLB’s integration history through kairos and chronotope, I demonstrate that the racial conversations surrounding baseball reflect America’s struggle to construct an inclusive national sport. Until and even after Jackie Robinson broke into MLB, the country struggled to reconcile baseball’s identity as the national pastime with its exclusionary status. Baseball had already become a significant part of what it means to be an American by this point, and the question of whom to include in that identity was being discussed widely and loudly.

Segregated Baseball, the Negro Leagues, and Kairos

Scholars have observed clear historical connections between August Wilson’s Troy

Maxson and real people. Sandra Shannon observes similarities between Troy and Wilson’s stepfather, David Bedford (Dramatic Vision 91-92). Bedford served time in prison for killing a man during a robbery, as Troy did (Shannon 92). Bedford is also a possible inspiration for

Cory; like Cory, Bedford was a star football player in high school hoping for a college scholarship (ibid). Susan Koprince cites Shannon’s observations, but also suggests correlations between Troy and Josh Gibson, the legendary catcher of the Homestead Greys and Pittsburgh Crawfords. Koprince notes that “throughout the play Wilson places Troy

within the historical context of the Negro Leagues, allowing his character to echo the feelings of actual black ballplayers who were denied a chance to compete at the major-league level”

(349). Thus, Wilson’s use of baseball invites a reading of baseball’s segregation and integration informing the world of the text.

Gibson’s batting power was so legendary that he earned the nickname “the Babe Ruth of the Negro Leagues” (“Baseball as History and Myth” 351). “But there were some,” says

Ken Burns’s Baseball, “who thought Ruth should have been called ‘the white Josh Gibson.’”

Gibson is frequently mentioned alongside his Pittsburgh Crawfords teammate Satchel Paige as a player who had the talent to play in Major League Baseball prior to Jackie Robinson’s entry into MLB in 1947 (Lamb “Baseball’s Whitewash”). Statistics were not consistently kept in the Negro Leagues, and much of black baseball’s competition took place in barnstorming tours or in Latin American leagues, so statistical analysis of black ballplayers is difficult; however, all anecdotal evidence suggests that Gibson belongs in the conversation of the greatest power hitters of all time alongside Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. Burns’s Baseball speculates that “his lifetime record may have approached 950” homeruns. Robert Peterson agrees in his study of black baseball, Only the Ball Was White: “It is likely that [Gibson] would have posed the most serious threat ever to Babe Ruth’s lifetime record of 714 home runs in the major leagues” (170). Thus, Troy’s association with Gibson places him in elite company among the very best African American ballplayers of his generation.

The popular narrative surrounding Gibson, as epitomized in Burns’s Baseball documentary series, depicts Gibson as man who was tormented by the fact that he never got his shot in the Majors; Burns quotes a Pittsburgh Courier piece that goes so far as to say that

Gibson “was murdered by Major League Baseball.” Indeed, Gibson “developed a fondness

for the bottle” in the later years of his career, and there is no doubt that he was aware that he was a good enough player to succeed in Major League Baseball (Peterson 167). However,

Robert Peterson questions this narrative; Gibson had suffered from a brain tumor for which he opted not to have surgery, and he eventually died of a stroke at the age of thirty-five.

Moreover, Gibson enjoyed his playing days and made more money than he would have without Negro League baseball (Peterson 168-9). Negro League player Ted Page describes

Gibson as “a big, overgrown kid who was glad for the chance he had. He loved his life” (qtd. in Peterson 170). It seems that the story of Gibson being killed by the mental anguish of segregation is a bit of a stretch, but the fact remains that Gibson’s lasting legacy as a ballplayer, unfairly, has more to do with what he was denied than what he accomplished.

The way historians speak of Gibson’s plight says much about the discourse surrounding segregation and integration of baseball in the 1930s and 1940s; time is ultimately cited as a deciding factor for why African American ballplayers who had the requisite talent were or were not permitted to play Major League Baseball. Peterson notes that “Josh Gibson would have been one of baseball’s superstars if the color line had been lowered earlier” (170). In “Death as a Fastball,” Christine Birdwell remarks that “integration came too late” for some black ball players (87). In The Cambridge Companion to Baseball,

Leslie Heaphy observes that for some players “such as Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, Mule

Suttles, and Buck Leonard the move came too late” (73). These temporal observations underscore one of the many lamentable aspects of the story of baseball’s segregation era: that even though Jackie Robinson eventually broke the barrier, many deserving players never reaped the benefits of Major League careers the way Robinson’s forebears did. Yet the focus on the timeliness of baseball’s integration constructs Gibson and his peers as merely unlucky,

victims of their birthdates rather than victims of perniciously racist club owners who resisted integration. Appeals to concepts of time are characteristic of the discourse surrounding baseball’s segregation, and eventually time becomes a tool of exclusion by those in power in

MLB.

Baseball’s segregation became a public debate in which the owners in MLB became invested as rhetors arguing to maintain the discriminatory status quo, and as rhetors they had to master kairos, the opportune moment or “a timely or appropriate moment for rhetorical action” in order to remain persuasive (Rickert Ambient Rhetoric 74). . As Rickert demonstrates, however, kairos “concerns attunement to a situation” (91). Rickert’s example of the loom illustrates that not only timeliness but precision is necessary to kairos (79).

Thinking of kairos through the example of the loom also gives it a material, physical quality.

Where rhetors must intervene in a specific moment that has invisible (though tangible) limitations, the metaphor of the loom makes those very real boundaries visible. Using

Rickert’s reading of a situationally aware, material kairos, it becomes evident that the owners’ argument is attuned to situation; appeals to time become part of an overall setting, a time-place in which the audience (white baseball fans) are not only appealed to, but also conditioned and constructed to accept the arguments in favor of segregation.

In order to fully develop the rhetorical tactics used in favor of and against baseball’s segregation, it is necessary to examine the way this debate played out in its day. MLB

Commissioner Kennisaw Mountain Landis had instituted a long-standing “gentlemen’s agreement” preventing MLB owners from signing African-American players, but the agreement relied on public silence. For instance, historian Charles C. Alexander relates two incidents that illustrate the secretive nature of this agreement. First, after former Brooklyn

Dodgers player-manager Leo Durocher publicly said he would have black players on his team if he were allowed, “Landis privately warned Durocher to keep his mouth shut on that subject” (Our Game 193). Later, baseball innovator Bill Veeck13, Jr. attempted to buy the

Philadelphia Phillies in 1943 and told Landis of his intention to sign black players; the

Phillies owner soon cancelled the sale (Our Game 194). Yet increasingly it became public knowledge that the likes of Gibson and Satchel Paige were clearly good enough to play, and segregation was not publicly palatable. As Heaphy writes, “World War II became the deciding factor, as it became harder to argue that both black and white young men could fight and die for their country, but not play baseball together” (“Baseball and the Color Line” 72).

According to Heaphy, the war caused Americans to question the legitimacy of racial exclusion in America’s pastime. Thus, with changing attitudes the public would no longer accept silence, but demanded an explanation. MLB did not want to integrate14, but in order to maintain their status quo the league would have to convince the public of its argument. In other words, postwar America was in a kairotic moment in which MLB needed to intervene as a rhetor.

Since the public demanded a discourse surrounding baseball’s segregation, Major

League Baseball used that discourse to justify their policy. In Discourse and Power, Teun

Van Dijk makes several important observations about the rhetorical tools of racism that

13 Veeck owned three different franchises over the course of his career, and is commonly known for promotional stunts such as when he signed Eddie Gaedel, who stood three feet seven inches tall and wore the number 1/8 on the back of his jersey. However, much more important than his marketing gimmicks was his support for African Americans in baseball. When he owned the Cleveland Indians, he signed Larry Doby, who broke the color line in the American League. Additionally, he was the only owner to support Curt Flood’s crusade against the Reserve Clause. Flood was an African American player who sued MLB for free agency. Flood’s case has often been framed as a struggle to emancipate ballplayers from a sort of slavery to their clubs. See “Bill Veeck” on Baseball Reference for details on Veeck’s career and see Matthew Fry Jacobson for a brief study of Curt Flood. 14 In this case MLB is metonymic for Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Landis was the first commissioner of MLB, and his authority was absolute. Even if owners wanted integration, they would have been powerless to achieve integration if Landis was set against it. The office of the commissioner is considerably less powerful today. See Zimbalist 206-7. 43

pertain to baseball’s rhetorical moves. First, “elites” have the biggest impact on these debates because of “their preferential access to public discourse” (106). Second, the “micro level

‘reality’ of racism ‘implements the overall structures and processes of dominance and inequality at the meso and macro levels” (121)—that is, individuals’ racist attitudes are enacted as policies and practices that have widespread, harmful effects. And third, people who have such racist attitudes often make rhetorical moves to deny racism, “semantic moves with a positive part about Us, and a negative part about Them” (109-110). One such move

Van Dijk identifies is the “transfer,” in which the speaker self-absolves by shifting blame onto another party. Chris Lamb studies the influential black sportswriter Wendell Smith’s crusade against segregation, and the tactic of transferring blame is evident in Lamb’s discussion of Smith. Smith quotes former National League President Ford Frick saying that

Major League Baseball actually desired integration but resisted because “the general public has not been educated to the point where they will accept them” (qtd. in Lamb 1). Frick goes on to say that “in the near future people will be more willing to accept the Negro ball players” and that while he could not “name any particular day or year,” he was willing to

“assure [Smith] that when people ask for the inclusion of [black baseball’s] players we will use them” (qtd. in Lamb 2). As Lamb observes, “Smith provided demonstrable evidence that the baseball establishment tried to lay the blame for segregated baseball with managers, players, and fans” (17). Additionally, Frick suggests that the players, managers, and fans held these views which prevented integration because the climate they lived in had failed to advance to the point of the progressive views necessary. It was a waiting game, in Frick’s opinion, until the time will be right for integration. The moment was not opportune yet for the first black major leaguer since Moses Fleetwood Walker. Wendell Smith powerfully

refuted Frick’s claims, collecting interviews from players and managers across Major League

Baseball, in which the vast majority of players said that they thought black players were good enough to play in the Majors, and the vast majority of managers said that they would utilize black players on their teams if permitted by team ownership.

Smith’s work is particularly praiseworthy considering that, as a black reporter, he was denied access to MLB clubhouses. Without access to the clubhouse, black rhetors were denied physical proximity to the most important parties to the debate. Smith did his work in hotel lobbies, hoping to catch players and managers in transit to and from their hotels. A physical limitation is imposed on Smith’s gathering of information as well as its dissemination. Smith and his African American colleagues wrote for African American- owned newspapers written for an African American audience. Without access to white spaces and white audiences, Smith had difficulty mastering the material circumstances of the debate.

The eventual entry of Jackie Robinson into Major League Baseball echoes the sense of kairos involved in the argument over baseball’s segregation. Rickert interprets kairos as material, consisting not only of time but of situation; moreover, he argues that “focusing on the opportunistic or decorous aspects of kairos brings with it a particular sort of audience- driven stance” (Ambient Rhetoric 91). The audience-driven aspect of kairos is demonstrated in the careful way in which Branch Rickey orchestrated Jackie Robinson’s entrée into MLB and the resultant popular narrative that sentimentalizes the process. Patricia Vignola, an independent historian who has published an oft-cited article on women in baseball (“The

Patriotic Pinch-Hitter”), refers to the common narrative of baseball’s integration as “the

American myth of the beneficent Caucasian savior [Branch Rickey] and the naïve African

American athlete [Jackie Robinson]” (“Enemies at the Gate” 71). What really happened, according to Vignola, “is ultimately a story of self-interest” (ibid). Vignola refers to the economic interest of Rickey in mining the Negro Leagues for unclaimed talent, but the undercurrent of the “Caucasian savior” dictating the terms of integration has been seen as problematic. Susan Petit calls Robinson’s integration story an instance of “cultural amnesia” surrounding baseball’s history, which she notes “has often been sentimentalized” (“Field of

Deferred Dreams” 127). Heaphy notes that Rickey “was not necessarily looking for the best player but the right one” and that “Rickey and Robinson both knew that if Jackie failed, the door would close again—and who knew when it might reopen” (72). Here, Rickey stressed the exigency of the kairotic opening to argue that non-retaliation was integral to Robinson’s ability to successfully integrate baseball. Rickey constructs an argument in which the moment was opportune, but only for the right type of man who could successfully navigate the small opening in public opinion. Failure would cause further delay for integration until a far-off second opportune moment. William C. Rhoden is more critical in Forty Million

Dollar Slaves, calling out what he refers to as “the Jackie Robinson model of how an integration-worthy African-American behaved: taking abuse, turning the other cheek . . . waiting for racist sensibilities to smolder and die out—if your spirit didn’t die first” (101).

There is no concern for the quality of Robinson’s play, but instead on his willingness to passively take abuse. Not just the timing and the manner, but the location was vital as well.

In addition to easing Robinson into white baseball by placing him in the Dodgers minor league affiliated team in Montreal, the location of Brooklyn itself was ideal; Andrew Paul

Mele notes that postwar Brooklyn was a bastion of racial diversity and harmony (“Boys of

Brooklyn” 104). With regard to time, place, and manner, baseball’s ownership controls every

aspect of integration, denying African American agency in the process through a rhetoric of timeliness.

Troy Versus Jackie

As we finish our discussion of baseball’s integration, it is important to note that

August Wilson carefully constructed Troy in conversation with the Jackie Robinson integration story. In the play’s first scene, Rose tells Troy that times have changed since his playing days: “They got a lot of colored baseball players now. Jackie Robinson was the first.

Folks had to wait for Jackie Robinson” (9). In response, Troy downplays the importance of

Jackie Robinson:

I done seen a hundred niggers play baseball better than Jackie Robinson. Hell,

I know some teams Jackie Robinson couldn’t even make! What you talking

about Jackie Robinson. Jackie Robinson wasn’t nobody. I’m talking about if

you could play ball then they ought to have let you play. Don’t care what

color you were. Come telling me I come along too early. If you could

play…then they ought to have let you play. (10)

Troy rejects the notion that Jackie Robinson was the right man for the right time. When Rose tells him that “folks just had to wait for Jackie Robinson” (9), Troy reacts with anger because he understands that integration was carefully constructed to continue the exclusion of capable players like Troy. Koprince points out that “unlike Robinson, Troy is no model citizen, and as an actual person, he would surely have increased tensions in the racially charged environment of the 1930s and 40s” (351). Troy’s violence in the past (he learned to play baseball while in prison for killing a man during a robbery) and confrontational attitude in

the present make him an unsuitable candidate to fulfill Branch Rickey’s design for integration.

Another aspect in which Troy differs importantly from Robinson is style of play.

Robinson was a flashy player who is celebrated for his speed and his daring on the base paths; Robinson was known for stealing home nineteen times in his career (regular season) and once during the 1955 World Series (Baseball Almanac). Robinson’s style was thought of as representative of the black style of baseball. The black style of play arose from the talents of the Negro Leagues, and it resonated with black fans of the day. However, fast-paced or flashy style of play certainly was not a universal characteristic of Negro League players.

Heaphy notes that Satchel Paige was a huge draw for fans due in part to his penchant for elaborate and varied deliveries; Josh Gibson meanwhile was considered a fan favorite simply because of his prodigious homerun power.15 Troy Maxson, like Gibson, did not play the black style of baseball. Koprince observes that “like Babe Ruth (and his Negro League counterpart, Gibson), Troy has embraced a conservative approach to the sport of baseball, eschewing the running game of Robinson or the spectacular fielding of [Willie] Mays, and focusing instead on hitting the ball out of the park” (352)16. Eddie Comeaux and Keith

Harrison write that “African American male athletes, ‘ballers,’ performers and artists” mirror

“the culture of the dance musician” in African American culture” (72). While one could interpret the term “baller” in multiple ways, Comeaux and Harrison’s comparison to dance musicians implies an active and energetic aesthetic that is evident in Robinson’s, Paige’s, and

15 To be fair, Paige’s talent was exemplary, and certainly sufficient to draw fans. However, Heaphy portrays Paige as something of a showman in addition to being a great pitcher. 16 Koprince’s construction of the power hitting game as “conservative” is debatable. Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, numbers two and four, respectively, on the all-time MLB home run leaderboard (see Baseball Reference), are both African American players who entered MLB within a decade of Robinson’s entry. However, Koprince’s larger point, that the Negro Leagues tended toward the slap-hitting, running style of Robinson certainly holds. 48

Mays’s styles. Gibson and Troy Maxson, on the other, hand, would appear more patient than active.

As an antithesis to Jackie Robinson’s identity as Branch Rickey’s kairotic black baseball player, Troy represents a threat to white baseball. If allowed into white baseball, he can directly compete with the likes of Babe Ruth, and what’s more, he would likely not keep his mouth shut in the face of racial abuse as Robinson did. Where Robinson was a fit for his time, place, and audience, Maxson feels stuck in place, misplaced in time, and resentful of audience. He is a kairotic misfit, and this is at the center of his conflicts throughout the play.

In order to analyze Troy’s problematic relationship to his time and place, I look to M.M.

Bakhtin’s discussion of literary chronotopes to complement my analysis of kairos.

Kairos Lost: Chronotope in Fences

Bakhtin defines chronotope as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (Dialogic Imagination 84). In other words, a genre or text’s particular construction of time and space lends a tangible quality to the text’s narrative construction. Chronotope is so important to the construction of the text that Bakhtin calls it a “formally constitutive category of literature” and says that “it is precisely the chronotope that defines genre and generic distinctions” (84-85). If a text’s construction of time and space can determine its genre, then that construction is clearly a major influence on how the text operates. In Fences, the chronotope inevitably reflects the drama genre, but it has a sense of time-place construction that is unique to the play’s connection to baseball’s history.

To connect Fences with baseball’s integration history, I offer that the similar temporal concerns of chronotope and kairos can be a starting point for a complementary

analysis of these two concepts. The relationship between chronotope and kairos most clearly suggested by Bakhtin’s definition is a disciplinary one, i.e. chronotope is to literature as kairos is to rhetoric17. This construction has value in its clarity, but compartmentalizing the concepts limits analysis. In Fences, the separation of kairos and chronotope as the historical and the dramatic is not quite illusory but ethereal. “In the literary artistic chronotope,”

Bakhtin writes, “spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible” (84).

The line between the two is visible but blurred and permeable. Bakhtin’s reading of chronotope in adventure-based romance novels, with their emphases on the intricacy and fragility of time in constituting the literary world, aligns chronotope with the sense of exigency involved in kairos: “adventure-time lives a rather fraught life in the romance; one day, one hour, even one minute earlier or later have everywhere a decisive and fatal significance” (Bakhtin 94). Kairos thus becomes embedded in the literary chronotope through plot construction; the characters read kairos in the narrative’s action, and the readers internalize kairos as part of the text’s space-time. Thus the chronotope cannot be completely separated from the “real” time of historical events that invokes kairos; kairos and chronotope become mutually informative and enriching.

Troy’s plight is loaded with a sense of kairos lost, a place-moment missed; yet the dramatic rendering of the aftermath of that failure, the play’s chronotope, is a sense that the past lingers, has become permanent. Troy clings to the attitudes that dominated his playing days, so much that he cannot celebrate or even accept integration as real. He displays his

17 Bakhtin explicitly limits his analysis of chronotope to the field of literature, saying “we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture” (84). 50

counterintuitive rejection of integration when Cory tries to connect with Troy by discussing baseball:

CORY. The Pirates won today. That makes five in a row.

TROY. I ain’t thinking about the Pirates. Got an all-white team. Got that

boy…that Puerto Rican boy…Clemente. Don’t even half-play him. That

boy could be something if they give him a chance. Play him one day and sit

him on the bench the next.

CORY. He gets a lot of chances to play.

TROY. I’m talking about playing regular. Playing every day so you can get

your timing. That’s what I’m talking about.

CORY. They got some white guys on the team that don’t play every day. You

can’t play everybody at the same time.

TROY. If they got a white fellow sitting on the bench…you can bet your last

dollar he can’t play! The colored guy got to be twice as good before he get

on the team. That’s why I don’t want you to get all tied up in them sports.

Man on the team and what it get him? They got colored on the team and

don’t use them. Same as not having them. All them teams the same.

CORY. The Braves got Hank Aaron and Wes Covington. Hank Aaron hit two

home runs today. That makes forty-three.

TROY. Hank Aaron ain’t nobody. That’s what you supposed to do. That’s

how you supposed to play the game. Ain’t nothing to it. It’s just a matter of

timing…getting the right follow-through. Hell, I can hit forty-three home

runs right now! (33-34)

Troy’s response to Cory’s innocent observation about the Pirates is confusing and curmudgeonly. He begins by complaining that racial inequality still exists in the league, as evident in his opinion that Roberto Clemente was not given the playing time he deserved. In

1957, the year of Act One of the play, Clemente actually played in 111 games and logged

474 plate appearances—lower numbers than Clemente’s career averages, but certainly enough playing time to consider him a regular starter (Baseball Reference). Indeed, 1957 was one of Clemente’s less stellar years in terms of his performance, but when Cory tries to reason with Troy, Troy argues (perhaps fairly) that white players get preferential treatment.

Cory pivots to discussing Hank Aaron, and Troy, incredibly, dismisses the great Henry

Aaron as only doing “what you supposed to do.” In 1957, Aaron finished the season with forty-four homeruns, won the National League Most Valuable Player (MVP) award, finished second only to Willie Mays in Wins Above Replacement (WAR), and won the World Series as a member of the Milwaukee Braves. The ending to Troy’s dismissal of Aaron demonstrates the feelings of historical slight that Troy feels. “It’s just a matter of timing,”

Troy claims, invoking both the historical timing of the much younger Aaron reaching his prime after integration as well as the timing intrinsic to the baseball swing.

The power hitter who has mastered the spatial-temporal politics of a major league plate appearance serves as a powerful foil for the kairos in baseball’s racial debates. Both the power hitter and the rhetor are tasked with recognizing the opportune moment and intervening appropriately; however, the chronos of the at-bat is measurable and visible while the kairos of the debate is indeterminate. Troy was a power hitter and makes sense of the world through baseball metaphors throughout the play; Birdwell notes that “Troy’s baseball metaphors become more than just a storyteller’s way of describing his experiences. Instead

they become ways of acting, of dealing with life’s crises” (92). Troy’s reference to the chronos of a baseball swing when downplaying Hank Aaron’s accomplishments are also an attempt to make sense of and cope with a sense of missed timing on the larger scale of kairos.

Baseball fails to help Troy understand the world because he cannot separate the timing of the baseball swing from the kairos of rhetoric, and his failure to understand the differences in timing leaves him frustrated. Troy knows that in his younger days, he had the timing of the at-bat mastered, but he was powerless to intervene in the kairotic moment of baseball’s integration saga. The prewar rhetoric of inequality and the postwar appeals to an unready public (as epitomized by Ford Frick) had successfully barred Troy from entry. Once Jackie

Robinson arrives in 1947, Troy has aged beyond his productive playing years, and in his fifties Troy struggles to cope with the fact that his timing faltered. This past-become- permanent reveals that the kairos stated or implied in the Jackie Robinson narrative became oppressive. As Koprince argues, “Troy’s dream of playing in the major leagues has been crushed by a racist society, but in his own imagination he is still at bat, still young, still a formidable threat at the plate” (355). Troy is a character whose own times victimized him, and yet he is unwilling to let go of them. Troy carries his pre-1947 anger with him into 1957.

As resentful as he is of being excluded from baseball before Jackie Robinson, he is almost as resentful of the fact that his anger is no longer relevant after Jackie Robinson. As Bakhtin observes, certain chronotopes are constituted not just of “chance simultaneity (meetings),” but also of “chance rupture (nonmeetings)” (92). “That is,” Bakhtin continues, “a logic of disjunctions in time” (ibid, Bakhtin’s emphasis). Indeed, Troy’s “nonmeetings” with Major

League Baseball—“an arena of endeavor in which black men could prove their equality to—

or superiority over—white men”—guide the way the rest of Troy’s life and the lives of his sons play out over the course of the play (Nowatzki “Foul Lines” 84).

Thus, the play’s chronotope is indelibly marked by Troy’s tragic relationship to

Jackie Robinson’s, Branch Rickey’s, and Ford Frick’s kairos. Bakhtin writes that “the image of man is always intrinsically chronotopic” (85), and Fences’ chronotope is not of an incorrect time, but of no time; that is, Troy belongs to no time. Thus, he seeks to escape the times around him. Rose identifies Troy’s failure to confront time when she tells him that

“times have changed from when you was young, Troy. People change. The world’s changing around you and you can’t even see it” (40). Troy’s blindness to changes wrought by postwar

America alibies for his stubborn arguments with Cory over the state of Major League

Baseball in 1957. Readers may react to the pain of a father refusing to connect with his admiring son, but in Troy’s mind, allowing Cory to uncritically accept MLB’s construction of equality is tantamount to sending Cory out into the world unprepared for the racist realities that wait on the other side of the fence. “The white man ain’t gonna let you get nowhere with that football noway,” Troy tells Cory (35). The passage of time makes no difference to Troy; as he sees it, the attitudes that excluded him from playing in the majors exist and persist outside of time and place, in defiance of what should be. When Rose insists that Troy just hit his prime too early, he responds saying “There ought not never have been no time called too early!” (9). Troy does not believe that the world has changed after Jackie Robinson, and he believes that his personal experience demands that he direct Cory off the sporting path with a firm hand.

Yet even as Troy denies the significance of any progress after Jackie Robinson, his actions belie his protestations and reveal that he believes himself capable of effecting

change—he does not, however, have confidence in anyone else’s ability to make lasting progress, whether that person is Jackie Robinson, Hank Aaron, or his own son. When faced with another battle over racial prejudice—his standoff with his employers—Troy fancies himself the Jackie Robinson of garbage collectors, becoming the first black driver. This stand, Matthew Roudané argues, is driven by Troy’s resentment of the history of discrimination behind him. “Troy has challenged his employer about the unfair working conditions under which he and other blacks labor. A lifetime of missed opportunities plague him and at his age he demands a reckoning” (138). It is not merely the unfair working conditions that drive Troy to his standoff against his employers, but a frustration over the repetition of past transgressions. The result of Troy’s belonging to no place-time is that he simultaneously rejects and clings to the racist chronotope of his playing days. Thus, when

Troy sees a repetition of segregation in his trash collection job, he acts to stand up to a familiar racism, and thus obsolve his failure to reach MLB in his youth.

This latter reaction, the refusal to admit that the segregationist paradigm that ruled

Troy’s playing days has passed, is manifested in the play’s most studied relationships—

Troy’s relationships to Cory and Lyons. As Harry Elam notes, the father-son dynamic is important to Fences “because of the weight Wilson assigns to this relationship, with its transmission of legacy and primogeniture” throughout Wilson’s oeuvre (Past as Present

129). Roudané has eloquently explained the generational angst between Troy and his sons:

Troy, with his sons Cory and Lyons, can only ponder the inevitability of their

biological and spiritual destiny. These are men who remain vaguely aware that

a replicating process ensures that the heritage propagated by their fathers and

their fathers before them has been transferred to the sons through a seemingly

ungovernable Darwinianism. The threat to future generations, Wilson implies,

is a given. (“Safe at Home” 141)

According to Roudané, the hereditary nature of socioeconomic standing precipitates a hereditary sense of melancholy and futility. Elam agrees, writing that “Troy has been warped by the resentment of the forces of social and economic oppression, and thus in turn he also becomes a warping presence for his son” (Past as Present 131). The seeds of disagreement between Cory and Troy are evident in the exchange between the two that continues their earlier conversation in which Troy has insisted that he, like Hank Aaron, could easily hit forty-three homeruns in a season:

CORY. Not off no major-league pitching, you couldn’t.

TROY. We had better pitching in the Negro leagues. I hit seven home runs off

of Satchel Paige. You can’t get no better than that!

CORY. Sandy Koufax. He’s leading the league in strikeouts.

TROY. I aint thinking of no Sandy Koufax.

CORY. You got Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette. I bet you couldn’t hit no

home runs off of Warren Spahn.

TROY. I’m through with it now. You go on and cut them boards. (34)

Cory’s need to assert his own knowledge shows that Cory is attuned to a different chronotope from Troy’s; the racist kairos of Troy’s youth has transformed into something that Cory sees as more advantageous. As in Alexie’s use of basketball explored in chapter one, the young athlete sees the playing field and its politics as a place to explore identity and belong in a multicultural society.

Cory feels the push and pull of Troy’s chronotope: a temporal pull backwards and a spatial push outwards. What makes the push and pull especially problematic for Cory’s development is that he cannot simply reject Troy’s influence because he feels an inexorable filial connection. The discomfort Cory feels as a result is on display in the play’s second act, when the stage notes show Cory as an ill-fitting inheritor of Troy’s legacy: “The following morning. CORY is at the tree hitting the ball with the bat. He tries to mimic TROY, but his swing is awkward, less sure” (59). Cory is clearly drawn to his father despite being quite different from him. It is a frustrating and dizzying phenomenon for Cory, who, contrary to

Troy, exists confidently in an apparently progressive time. Moreover, while Troy doubts the egalitarian possibilities that the world of baseball has to offer—as displayed by his cognitively dissonant claim that the Pirates were an “all-white” team even with Roberto

Clemente—Cory is assured in his logic that the Pirates, MLB, and the sporting world that will enable him to play college football have all to some degree elided the exclusionary boundaries that Troy sees everywhere. In short, Troy’s chronotope looks to the past while seeing threats everywhere outside the makeshift castle walls that are the always-under- construction fence of his property; Cory’s chronotope looks forward and sees opportunity outside—and a prison inside—Troy’s fence.

Troy’s other son Lyons, meanwhile, is difficult to characterize chronotopically. As

Troy emphatically reminds anyone in hearing distance, Lyons is prone to showing up at Troy and Rose’s house on Troy’s payday to borrow money. Like Cory, he eschews the manual labor that Troy insists is the most prudent way to make a living. As the play’s description of

Lyons states, Lyons “fancies himself a musician,” but “is more caught up in the rituals and

‘idea’ of being a musician than in the actual practice of making music” (13). Lyons’s music

may represent a parallel to Cory’s football as an opportunity that is newly available to young black men in the northeast. However, as Lyons’s description suggests, he is unlikely to make it as a professional musician, and the play’s final scene, set in 1965, reveals that Lyons was attempting to make his way in the world through an illegal check-cashing scheme for which he is serving time. Cory’s figurative imprisonment under Troy’s dominion is tragically reinforced by Lyons’s literal imprisonment—an imprisonment that has apparently been interrupted for Troy’s funeral, an uncanny spell of freedom that in fact prolongs his imprisonment. Meanwhile, the limitless possibilities in which Cory believed as a teenager have faded into the regimented life of a U.S. Marine for six years. As Lyons encourages Cory to “stick with Uncle Sam and retire early” (94), the specter of Vietnam looms large, as does the remaining nine months of Lyons’s sentence; the immediate future of these two half- brothers feels less than promising.

Troy and Rose’s marriage also hinges on Troy’s attitude toward his time and situation. Troy emphasizes this fact as he relates the beginning of their relationship to Bono:

Rose’ll tell you. She asked me when I met her if I had gotten all that

foolishness out of my system. And I told her, “Baby, it’s you and baseball all

what count with me.” You hear me, Bono? I meant it too. She say, “Which

one comes first?” I told her, “Baby, ain’t no doubt it’s baseball…but you stick

and get old with me and we’ll both outlive this baseball.” Am I right, Rose?

And it’s true. (55)

Troy links baseball with “all that foolishness,” an expression that we can safely associate with a womanizing lifestyle. Importantly, it is Rose who required Troy to leave that lifestyle behind as a condition of their relationship. By doing so, she demonstrates that the younger

Troy is too immature for a successful relationship. It is a short leap to the conclusion that it is

Troy’s failure to mature that ultimately wrecks the marriage. Troy’s affair with Alberta is a return to his younger “foolishness,” or perhaps a sign that he never progressed beyond it. As

Birdwell argues, Troy’s affair “returns Troy to baseball’s yesteryears, in which, according to

Bono, ‘a lot of them old gals was after [him]’” (93). When Troy confesses his infidelity, he tells Rose that “it’s not easy for me to admit that I been standing in the same place for eighteen years,” confirming that he clings to an illusory past (70). Rose’s response, an impassioned monologue that finally shines a light on Troy’s selfishness, demonstrates that she understood and attempted to navigate Troy’s stagnant chronotope:

I been standing with you! I been right here with you, Troy. I got a life too. I

gave eighteen years of my life to stand in the same spot with you. Don’t you

think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes?

What about my life? What about me […] I took my feelings, my wants and

needs, my dreams…and I buried them inside you. I planted a seed and

watched and prayed over it. I planted myself inside you and waited to bloom.

And it didn’t take me no eighteen years to find out the soil was hard and rocky

and it wasn’t never gonna bloom. (70-71)

Rose’s response evokes temporal and situational elements—years, waiting, and a desire for growth—that conflict with Troy’s chronotopic refusal of time and movement.

Finally, Rose breaks the cycle of Troy’s failures when she agrees to be a mother to

Raynell, Troy’s illegitimate daughter whose mother died in childbirth. Rose agrees to take care of the girl, noting that “you can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child” and that “a motherless child has got a hard time” (79). But in light of the way Troy has affected Cory

and Lyons, the kindest thing Rose does for Raynell is officially cutting ties with Troy. “This child got a mother,” Rose tells Troy, “but you a womanless man” (79). It is a piercing comment aimed at a man whose value, in youth as well as in age, was derived in part from his appeal to women. His ballplayer’s swagger is gone.

Unmanned, Troy is quick to anger when he perceives disrespect from Cory. A scuffle ensues, and Troy kicks Cory out of the house. Roudané and Deeanne Westbrook have both observed an Oedipal theme in Fences; considering the scene’s placement after Rose ends the relationship with Troy, it is plausible to see Troy as confronting Cory because Cory has replaced Troy as a man in Rose’s life. But there are temporal and spatial politics at play in this conflict as well. Troy has been counting the offenses Cory commits like an umpire calling strikes, warning Cory not to strike out. Troy is remarkably quick to anger in this scene, calling strike three on Cory over the minor offense of trying to walk past Troy after

Troy refuses to give way for Cory to enter the house. Troy’s large frame fills the steps, hearkening back to the play’s opening description of Troy, which observes that Troy’s

“largeness informs his sensibilities and the choices he has made in life” (1). Thus Troy’s size prevents Cory from getting by, and his attempt to walk past without permission is an invasion of Troy’s space, both in terms of the bodily space he occupies and the symbolic space of the house, from which Rose has tacitly exiled Troy by banning him from her bed. The two men’s conflicting senses of time and place—Troy’s stillness and Cory’s motion—finally collide because the play’s chronotope has become rushed and compressed.

The telling kairotic moment, dependent on a contested sense of space and an urgency of time, has arrived. In Troy’s younger days, white baseball owners used an argument over timing to deny black ballplayers entry into Major League Baseball. The world was not ready

for a black ballplayer, they insisted; when that argument no longer suited the situational, audience-driven aspects of kairos that Thomas Rickert emphasizes, they shifted their argument to anoint Jackie Robinson as the right man to integrate baseball, leaving the likes of

Josh Gibson and Troy Maxson out of integrated baseball. In the play, Troy and Cory’s telling moment ends with Troy winning the struggle for the baseball bat in part because Troy is bigger, but mostly because Cory cannot bring himself to strike his father. In a situation in which Troy will not hear reason, the telling moment requires violence to win the argument.

Troy uses that situation to expel Cory from the yard, and he does so calling Cory a

“nigger…just another nigger on the street to me!” and shouting at Cory to “get your black ass out of my yard!” (87). Troy perversely directs the slurs at his own son, turning kairos into a weapon of expulsion in a more violent and direct enactment of the way white baseball owners used the rhetorical situation to divide and oppress.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Fences shows that those left behind when inertia gives way to progress in the painful legacy of segregation face harsh realities that counter the romanticized narratives of integration. Jackie Robinson’s greatness as a ballplayer and as a black leader cannot be denied, but his story reveals that he was pitched as the right man for the right time, which harmfully implies that other black men were the wrong men. Josh Gibson had proved his worth on the field, as had many other Negro League stars. In Fences, Troy Maxson feels that he also had the talent to play in the majors, and when time or age is used to explain his exclusion, he rightly points to a simpler racism carried out through a mastery of kairos. Time, place, and situation become rhetorical tools of racism and exclusion. Troy, suffering the effects of that racism and exclusion, helps to build a chronotope throughout the play of an

unhealthy timelessness and an insufficiency of space. It is as untenable as the racist exclusion of black baseball players prior to Jackie Robinson, and its own effects will infect the generations to come. Only the irrelevance and death of the father will prevent his sins from being visited upon the children.

“Bourgeois Nationalism”: The Strange Bedfellows of American Soccer Fandom

The preceding chapters discussed American sports on two distinct levels of competition, followed participants at either end of the age continuum of athletes, and focused on two specific spaces in which sports operate. In my exploration of the role of basketball in

Sherman Alexie’s novel, I operated within lines of play and observed a young player competing at an amateur level in a bildungsroman. In discussing the role of baseball in

August Wilson’s Fences, I focused on the making of temporal and spatial boundaries and watched a man beyond playing age reflect on his bygone professional baseball career. I now turn my attention outside the lines and into the stands; by discussing fan involvement in soccer, this chapter traverses all age groups but find experiences strictly removed from the realm of physical competition. And, importantly, I turn my attention away from an

“American” sport. Doing so provides a valuable inversion of the lens through which we view

American cultural exchange through sport. As Paul Giles argues, “America is valuable not for what it might be in itself, but for the interference it creates in others; accordingly,

American studies must increasingly involve analysis of how the United States interfaces with other world cultures” (“Virtual Americas” 544-5). If examinations of sport in Alexie and

Wilson tell us about America’s struggle with inclusion along racial and national lines, an examination of soccer can tell us about inclusion along class lines, and it can tell us about how Americans construct identity through sport when the sport’s infrastructure has yet to be built. To examine the interactions of Americans with the world of soccer, I ask: What happens when a growing number of Americans engage a sport with European origins? Why are some Americans embracing soccer while others reject it? What does American soccer fandom tell us about American culture?

To address these questions, I look at soccer as a cultural object, with narratives created around it in literature and popular media. I focus a significant portion of my analysis on Michael J. Agovino’s The Soccer Diaries and Franklin Foer’s How Soccer Explains the

World. The Soccer Diaries is a 2014 fan memoir that emulates the structure of English author

Nick Hornby’s canonical Fever Pitch; Soccer Diaries is unstudied in scholarly work save for my review of it for the Sport Literature Association. The memoir is not one of a kind, but it provides valuable insight into the character of a particular kind of American soccer fan, and memoirs of its ilk will likely grow in number and significance as Americans become increasingly engaged with soccer. How Soccer Explains the World is a piece of pseudo- journalistic creative nonfiction; it is more often cited in soccer literature (it has been out since

2004, a ten-year head start on Agovino), and it is important as a prominent and relatively early American take on soccer. I examine these texts alongside pop-culture accounts of soccer to address the questions previously posed. In the end, I find a fascinating development in American soccer interactions culminating in a class dynamic that invests soccer with political and cultural contests. I view this dynamic through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of taste, habitus, and the production of cultural goods economies. The result is a unique marriage of nationalism and intellectualism, what Foer terms “bourgeois nationalism,” uniting disparate fan factions to keep the engines of capitalism moving.

Early American Reactions: Nascent Popularization and Rejection

Prior to 1994, there was very little soccer culture in the United States. Michael

Agovino dubs the time before 1994 “the dark ages,” and during this time he had to work hard at his fandom because he had little access to the game. Meanwhile in England, a dark cloud of fan violence hung over the sport after two disasters in soccer stadiums: the 1985 Heysel

disaster in Brussels, Belgium and the 1989 Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England had resulted in fan deaths18. The response had created resentment (or at least melancholy) in the working-class English fan base who felt pushed out of stadiums to make room for a more moneyed clientele.19 The United States had not qualified for a World Cup between 1950 and

1990, and not many Americans seemed to care. It’s little wonder that a young Agovino despairs for his new favorite sport:

Two days [after Heysel], the U.S. national team was set to play Costa Rica

in a World Cup qualifying match, in Torrance, California…It was at a tiny

stadium at El Camino College, with a capacity of 11,800 fans, most cheering

either for Costa Rica or against the Americans.

The United States needed only a draw to progress to the final round of

regional qualifying with Canada and Honduras. This was the same U.S. team

that a year ago—a year and one day ago—tied Italy, the World Cup

champions, at Giants Stadium, in the deluge, the start of something big.

Instead, the U.S. lost, 1-0. The NASL was dead; financial mismanagement

caught up to it. The U.S. national team was dead. Most shockingly, people,

people who just wanted to watch a live game, were dead in Brussels, gone for

no reason. The New York Times Week in Review on Sunday quoted L’Equipe,

the French sports newspaper that gave birth to the European Cup in the 1950s:

18 It should be noted that the disaster at Hillsborough had nothing to do with fan behavior or hooliganism; the problem, as Lord Taylor’s report indicated, was a combination of stadium design, mismanaged crowd distribution, and a poor emergency response to the incident. See Taylor’s “Interim Report.” 19 See Redhead’s Post-Fandom and Hornby’s Fever Pitch. Both note that the Taylor Report, undertaken in response to Hillsborough, recommended all English stadiums convert to all-seaters to ensure fan safety. Due to renovation costs and decreased ticket supply, tickets became more expensive and the working-class culture in soccer stadiums changed irrevocably. 65

“If this is what soccer has become,” they wrote, “let it die.”

Soccer—my new friend—was dead. (64-5)

Soccer would not remain dead in the United States indefinitely. The 1994 World Cup was awarded to the United States, and a new professional league, Major League Soccer

(MLS) was planned as part of the bid (Janofsky). The fact that soccer had been well attended at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles has been cited as a contributing factor for the decision, as well as a desire on the part of FIFA to grow the game in the United States

(ussoccer.com). There certainly seems to be a glimmer of hope for American soccer fans by

1994. Agovino recognizes this glimmer when he sees the official mascot of USA ’94 unveiled: “The World Cup was going to happen. It was coming. There was light. This being

America, the mascot made it official” (112). This proclamation of hope concludes Part 1 of

Agovino’s memoir, “The Dark Ages,” and ushers in Part 2, which is aptly called “The

Renaissance.”

However, the view of USA’s successful bid for the 1994 World Cup as a boon for

U.S. soccer comes from a decidedly American perspective. In other parts of the world, as

Steve Redhead notes in his excellent take on soccer culture, Post-Fandom and the Millenial

Blues, it was “an eccentric choice” to put it kindly (84). Redhead quotes Pete Davies writing for The Guardian in 1993: “If there’s one country on this Earth where the World Cup can happen and a whole bunch of people not even notice or care, then this [the U.S.] is the one”

(qtd in Redhead 79). In addition to this sense that Americans would not care about the World

Cup, people saw the decision as the ultimate victory of capitalism over the pure beauty of the game. America’s capitalist absolutism and extreme “mediatisation” would corrupt the game in an effort to make it more marketable, more American. Redhead quotes Paul Morley

positioning USA ’94 as a contest of values: “When the World Cup happens in America, it will be the great battle between football, as some kind of original poetic tradition, against the ultimate in marketing” (qtd. in Redhead 70). Morley goes on to say that “it’s going to be interesting to see whether the World Cup football will survive the American need to fake their emotion to make sure that it happens. The thing about Americans—they have to ensure that there are the peaks and troughs, the highs and the lows. Ultimately, they don’t really leave things to chance. Football’s all about leaving things to chance” (qtd. in Redhead 71).

Paradoxically, English football commentators simultaneously critique Americans for their apathy while also claiming that Americans will create a media frenzy that will overtake the sport. It seems that the English football world was ambivalent about the U.S. getting involved; as it turns out, so were Americans.

The World Cup being held in the U.S. in 1994 marks a watershed moment for

America’s interest in soccer. as American interest continued to grow in the sport, a bifurcated acceptance developed that saw two classes of American soccer fans form: the soccer intelligentsia, and the class of soccer fans that the intelligentsia sees as less sophisticated in its appreciation of soccer; but those early days of what Agovino calls “the Renaissance” are marked by two troubling reactions among Americans confronted with the sport: rejection and incompetence, responses which are by no means mutually exclusive. American rejection of soccer felt like a kneejerk reaction to an unfamiliar experience initially, but as more

Americans embraced soccer, the rejection became more defiant and politically charged. The second reaction, what I’m calling incompetence, may be more charitably described as inexperience or perhaps naïveté; from game-play to commentary, American soccer attempts

to Americanize, and those attempts get interpreted as a lack of appreciation or understanding for the game’s nuances.

The Americans who reject soccer outright dismiss it as unimportant, unlikeable, or un-American. Redhead observes that “soccer is, in many ways, alien to American popular culture—an originally European cultural form inserting itself into the psyche…of the USA”

(92). If such an insertion into American psyches indeed occurred after USA ’94, it overcame a tremendous amount of apathy that existed beforehand. When Agovino embraced soccer in the early 1980s, he observes that he “may have been in thrall, but not everyone was” (19).

He then goes on to recall that “it was often both laughable and revolting to hear some of our local sportscasters treat the planet’s most popular sport with an ignorance they seemed genuinely proud of” (19). These sportscaster laughed at the sport, almost incredulous that they are being asked to waste precious seconds of their important sportscast talking about this silly game.

Moreover, in How Soccer Explains the World, Franklin Foer identifies the rejection of soccer continuing on into the post-September 11th era and links it with right-wing politics.

Simplifying post-9/11 foreign policy down a set of basic binaries—liberalism, globalization, opposition to the U.S. war in Iraq, and soccer versus conservatism, American exceptionalism, support for the war in Iraq, and hatred of soccer—Foer observes that, for soccer’s opponents,

“soccer isn’t exactly pernicious, but it’s a symbol of the U.S. junking its tradition to ‘get with the rest of the world’s program’” (245). So for soccer opponents, the equivalence of soccer with Europe makes soccer, quite simply, bad. Conservative pundit Ann Coulter performs this sort of soccer hatred in a blog post on her website during the 2014 World Cup. The title of the post points the way to her argument simply enough: “America’s Favorite National

Pastime: Hating Soccer.” Coulter starts off by announcing that “any growing interest in soccer can only be a sign of the nation’s moral decay.” Coulter will later go on to deny the existence of any growing interest, leaving the reader to wonder if there is indeed any moral decay. The seventh and eighth reasons Coulter gives are tied closely together. Reason number seven is succinctly put: “It’s foreign.” Coulter feels no need to explain. Foreign equals bad, now let’s move on. Reason number eight requires a bit more mental gymnastics:

“Soccer is like the metric system.” The reader must trust Coulter on this one. She does not explain how soccer is in any way similar to the metric system; rather, she links the metric system to France and China, which, as Coulter has established, are bad because they are foreign. In another interesting pair of arguments, Coulter confusingly argues in point number six that soccer is being “force-fed” to Americans the way that “light-rail, Beyonce and

Hillary Clinton” are while insisting in point number nine that “soccer is not ‘catching on.’”

She even cites media coverage of the “record U.S. ratings for [the] World Cup” but simply dismisses them as some combination of being a myth of liberal media spin, being immigrant- driven, and being insignificant in comparison with American football. The coup de grace, however, is when Coulter describes soccer as animalistic because it bars the players from handling the ball—“What sets man apart from the lesser beasts, besides a soul, is that we have opposable thumbs”—and then claims as she signs off that the only “Americans” watching soccer (Coulter indicates skepticism with quotation marks here) are immigrants.

These comments demonstrate the extreme in fears of soccer as foreign, but subtler rejections of soccer would likely represent subtler fears.

It feels odd to find soccer, a form of play and entertainment, to be a site of such political significance for a pundit like Coulter. Yet Allen Guttmann correctly points out that

“although some historians continue to write as if sport and politics were immiscible categories, most now acknowledge the political implications of sport and many emphasize the political controversies that have occurred within and around the domain of sport”

(“Sport, Politics and the Engaged Historian” 363). The popularization of soccer in the United

States carries this type of political potential. For Foer, the sources from which anti-soccer arguments originate in the U.S. matter a great deal. Foer notes that “not just pundits buried in the C Section of the paper, but people with actual power believe that soccer represents a genuine threat to the American way of life” (240-1). Coulter certainly is a well-known figure—not “buried in the C Section of the paper”—and her influence is far-reaching, even if not packing “actual power.” Moreover, Foer seems to think that the U.S. is unique in its rejection of soccer: “Other countries have greeted soccer with relative indifference,” Foer argues, “but the United States is perhaps the only place where a loud portion of the population actively disdains the game, even campaigns against it” (240).

On the latter point, Foer is mistaken. In the early twentieth century in Ireland, an active campaign by the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) sought to actually ban soccer as well as painting it as an unwelcome English intrusion. As Conor Curran notes, “the GAA failed in its attempt to turn public opinion against soccer by portraying it as a ‘foreign’ game”

(“Sport and Cultural Nationalism” 94). In the time period Curran examines, from 1905 to

1934, Ireland’s revolution informs the GAA’s attempt to assert the game with Irish origins—

Curran discusses Gaelic football, and the GAA also oversees the sport of hurling—over one with English origins. The GAA’s campaign against soccer was more concerted and institutionalized than the nebulous anti-soccer reactions in the U.S., but the tactic of reading national identities and values in sports is common to both nations’ relationships to soccer. In

the U.S., the debate has less apparent exigency than that of the GAA; rather, the rejection appears to come from a place of unfamiliarity with the sport. Foer has hit on a pervasive narrative surrounding American involvement in soccer, the same one that Redhead implies when he says that soccer is “alien to American popular culture” (92): Americans were encountering a form with which they have no familiarity, and consequently some resisted its encroachment.

Soccer Talk and American Incompetence

I have identified one reaction to this encounter—outright rejection—but the reaction to Americanize and reveal a lack of fluidity and knowledge, i.e. incompetence, presents a significant hurdle for writers like Agovino. One example of soccer incompetence comes from

Agovino’s sardonic memory of his first experience playing organized soccer. Agovino’s tale reveals a common trope among the Americans who attempt, however feebly, to dip their toes into the waters of this European curiosity; they tend to butcher the language of the game, and they do so by attempting to carry American language and aesthetics onto the pitch with them.

By doing so, they reciprocate the cultural invasion that Redhead hints at when he refers to soccer as “an originally European cultural form inserting itself into the psyche (or sign) of the USA” (92). As I will show, Americans foist the sign of the USA onto the European form of soccer.

Agovino’s narrative structure enables my reading that U.S. vernacular and popular aesthetics attach to soccer as Americans encounter the game. Agovino’s initial experience of the game importantly comes from watching a World Cup—an international tournament held in Spain in 1982 in which the United States did not participate. There could have been no mistaking, by young Agovino, the tournament for an American enterprise. Moreover, the fact

of the Italians’ victory feels important to Agovino’s sense of identity. Their success enables

Agovino to see the Italians on the world’s biggest stage and to develop a connection between this football team and his own Italian-American heritage. Agovino wonders: “Was I an Italy fan because they won the World Cup and I had gone with the winner?… Or did roots—those vowels at the end of names, the reed-thin bodies, locks of gentle curlicues, the noses, of

Roman or Neapolitan or Sicilian origin—lure me?” (53). Here Agovino feels a sentimental connection to his people, or a sense of pride in his family’s original country. The international context of the World Cup allows Agovino to see the Italian team standing among other nations; the other nations provide a backdrop for young Agovino that highlights the ways Agovino saw himself as similar to the Italians.

However, an important sense of alienation underlies the sentimentality of belonging.

Agovino feels so much like the Italians because he feels unlike his home community.

Agovino recalls: “I was an Italian; if not a self-hating one, then merely a young person with a sense of rebellion on the one hand and on the other an anxious desire to assimilate with his peers, none of whom was Italian, most of whom were black” (53). And while he remarks that he feels accepted by his black peers, there persists a sense of not belonging. Just two pages prior to this remark, Agovino recalls an encounter with two black girls who flirt with him as he practices kicking a soccer ball by himself. Agovino remarks that “black girls were off- limits” and that dating a black girl “would have been dangerous and would likely get you taunted or beat up by blacks” (51). Agovino remarks that “there were still some white people left in Co-op City, not nearly as many as ten, or five years before, but you never saw white boys with black girls” (ibid). Agovino’s recollection of talking to these girls makes him realize something about his luck with girls during his youth: “White girls I had no idea how

to talk to; black girls might get me beat up” (ibid). The realization here is that his upbringing in a racially diverse neighborhood in New York has made him comfortable in cosmopolitan surroundings, but that there would always be a limit to the reaches of racial diversity. His acceptance among the black community would not extend to dating, but this was the community he felt closer to, as evidenced by his admission that he “had no idea how to talk to” white girls. Thus, Agovino constructs a narrative stance that expresses a feeling of otherness on a racial and national level. He feels inclusion with Italians playing an unfamiliar sport on another continent, while he feels like a minority kicking a ball around in his own neighborhood.

When Agovino then encounters soccer apart from its European context, he feels a parallel intrusion of Americanism into his new favorite sport. After his summer fling with soccer during the 1982 World Cup, Agovino turns to his high school team to develop his relationship with soccer. However, he again feels like an outsider, even though it seems he has the most knowledge and experience with the game. There is a sense that this American version bears little resemblance to the international game he first encountered. Agovino recalls, “I tried to engage my new teammates, and classmates, in soccer conversation. Did you watch the World Cup?...No one had, nor did they seem to care that they had missed the greatest spectacle in sport. All they talked about on our team was who was going to play fullback or halfback” (30). This is insult to injury for Agovino. Not only do they not share his experience, making him feel like an outsider again, they are encroaching on his beloved sport, but Agovino’s experience tells him that his classmates they have no idea what they are talking about: “From Toby Charles, I knew just forward, midfield, defense, sweeper, wingers, and ‘keeper,’ not ‘goalie.’ He used the term fullback, but sparingly. Here, now, with

these new kids, everyone was a fullback or halfback as in the NFL… They seemed to be

Americanizing the sport” (31). The coach is even worse: “The only thing we were taught to do by the coach/gym teacher, in our practices and now in games, was to ‘boot it.’ That or

‘put a boot in it’ or ‘stick a head in it.’ I’d never heard the great Toby Charles use that expression on Soccer Made in Germany” (31). Since Agovino’s first look at the game is through a global lens, his view of American soccer appears distorted. He is first made aware of the game by seeing it play out on an international stage from which Americans and

American culture were wholly absent. When he tries to find the game in his hometown, he finds that the presence of Americans and American culture turn the game into a different, less enthralling game.

Moreover, when Agovino goes to a New York Cosmos match and observes the North

American Soccer League’s (NASL) odd take on soccer, he sees an almost Frankensteinian blending of soccer with American sports. The terminology shifts in the NASL to the point where the game takes on the bizarre feeling of a spectacle rather than a sporting event, albeit one that is failing to sell many tickets. In order to market to Americans unfamiliar with soccer, the terminology changed. Agovino describes some of these changes:

In two weeks’ time, the Cosmos or the Sockers would play in the final, known

as the Soccer Bowl. There were [other Americanizations]: in the box score,

the goal scorer was listed with two assist-makers, as in the NHL; and the time

of the goal, also as in hockey, was listed by the minute and second. To break a

tie at the end of ‘overtime,’ a game would go into a ‘shootout,’ a more skillful

rendition of the penalty-kick round, in which a player began at the thirty-five

yard line—another NASL wrinkle—and had five seconds to advance the ball

and shoot past the oncoming keeper, who was more often than not referred to

here as the ‘goalie’ (again, as in ice hockey)” (24-5).

Beyond the cringe-worthy pun (the San Diego Sockers), these changes do little to actually make the game more marketable. From Agovino’s point of view, the American game feels infantilized, as though the professional league and its broadcasters sound like Agovino’s teammates on the first day of practice. Agovino muses that first day at practice, “I was waiting to hear someone call out, ‘I have first dibs on quarterback’” (31). This is not a good look for a professional sports league.

Aaron DeNu argues that American soccer broadcasters display a similar tendency to

Americanize. Rather than using awkward ice hockey or American football terms, the broadcasters DeNu identifies more subtly import American broadcasting conventions into the realm of soccer. One of the culprits is an American discomfort with silence; “American announcers tend to feel compelled to fill in every available minute with verbiage,” says

DeNu, even though “often the buzz of the crowd naturally creates a default auditory canvas for the match” (“Transforming Soccer Talk” 258). The over-announcing takes away from a idyllic broadcast that more closely approaches the essence of the game. Additionally, the second member of the broadcast team represents for DeNu another imposition of American sports broadcasts onto soccer. The second voice often is that of a former player acting as a coach, transforming the broadcast into “programmed pedagogy” (259). This educational model has held sway because of a supposed need to teach American fans the basics of the game; for DeNu, this model results in “violations of the generic expectations for a particular speech genre” (256). DeNu argues that these violations in expectation cause a breakdown of the linguistic sign proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure’s linguistic sign consists of a

signifier, or the sound made by a speaker, and a signified, or the concept understood by the listener. Saussure argues that “the arbitrary nature of the sign explains in turn why the social fact alone can create a linguistic system. The community is necessary if values that owe their existence solely to usage and general acceptance are to be set up; by himself the individual is incapable of fixing a single value” (“Courses in General Linguistics” 968). In other words, linguistic systems, like the one used by avid soccer fans, only function when used in the context of a community that can ascribe values to the sign. The American broadcasters DeNu studies attempt to transfer the values of one community, consumers of American sports broadcasts, to another, consumers of soccer broadcasts; the result is ineffective communication. The “generic expectations” of which DeNu speaks parallel those of the young Agovino who has discovered soccer on the global stage, with the relay of television signals representing the only American intervention. As a result, what Agovino sees on the

American soccer pitch sounds perversely foreign.

“Bourgeois Nationalism”

I have illustrated two results of American interaction with soccer—an obstinate rejection of the game as un-American, and an inelegant attempt at Americanization of the game that can be interpreted as incompetence. In some ways, I have used broad strokes to classify and describe these reactions because they represent pervasive cultural narratives about American involvement in soccer. However, another narrative exists that pervades

American culture, perhaps as deeply, about the classed nature of American soccer fandom, those who neither reject soccer nor appear to Americanize it. A class of soccer fan known alternately as the “soccer intelligentsia,” “soccer literati,” “soccerati,” or to use Foer’s term,

“soccer cognoscenti,” has developed (246). These terms describe an American soccer

fandom that is well-versed in soccer on a global scale as well as being educated in the

“traditional” sense—that is, availed of the privileges of white collar education and socialization. This type of fandom is not exclusive to American soccer, but the overall portrait of the American soccer fan—as reflected in popular accounts of American soccer from literature like Agovino’s and Foer’s as well as those circulated via television, blogs, podcasts, and social media—describes a literate class of fan, one who occupies a different habitus from that of an implied “other” class of soccer fan who pack stadiums but do not write, speak, or philosophize deeply about the game’s finer points. The coexistence of these two classes of soccer fan reveal a capitalistic negotiation of cultural influences that is eventually solved by the advent of bourgeois nationalism, an aesthetic symbiosis that unites the warring factions within American soccer supporters.

The narrative of the American soccer fan as a cultural elitist is a pervasive one.

Franklin Foer identifies this narrative as a series of “culture wars” between the elitist soccer fan and those who approach the game less intelligently. Foer self-identifies as the former, referring to “the yuppie soccer fans” and “America’s soccer cognoscenti” as his “side” of the aforementioned culture wars (246). He also acknowledges that his side “invite[s] abuse” because their “sneering critique” of less-enlightened fans comes off as snobbish (246). I doubt that Foer helps the problem by glorying in labels like “yuppie” and “cognoscenti,” and

Agovino agrees. Upon hearing the term “soccer weenie” being self-applied by a friend of his,

Agovino reacts with horror: “Sorry, a soccer what? He had used the term ‘Euro-snob’ in the

‘90s, post-MLS launch. I didn’t like that term and didn’t consider myself one, but I understood what he meant. But ‘soccer weenie’?...there was nothing ‘weenie’ about us”

(190-1). On the surface, Agovino would certainly seem to belong with this class of soccer

fan, even if he didn’t like the labels applied—he was a writer for Esquire and Newsweek before going freelance, and his narrative describes a pseudo-expatriate life in Switzerland that could easily be used as fodder for an anti-“Euro-snob” critique. Yet Agovino feels that the exclusivity this type of fan practices is deplorable particularly in the wide internet distribution of their classed aesthetic: “the writing of the overeducated literati and nerds felt smarter than thou, precious, show-offy, free for anyone to read, but really just between themselves” (Agovino 247). Thus, Agovino identifies the narrative of the soccer intelligentsia occupying a prominent place in America soccer culture, but sees its aesthetic committing the sin of exclusivity.

Lest anyone think his critique is generalized, Agovino takes aim at Foer in a fascinating moment of intertextuality. Agovino provides a micro-review of Foer’s How

Soccer Explains the World, followed by a bona fide parlor moment when Agovino and Foer attend a European Cup game with the same group. The exchange serves to illustrate the difference between Foer’s elitist, intellectualist approach to soccer fandom and Agovino’s professed inclusive, intercultural approach. Foer attends an important match played at one of the highest levels of international soccer and does not bother to make friendly conversation with Agovino, a member of his travelling party. The two share not only soccer fandom but also the profession of writing; they certainly would have plenty to chat about. Agovino almost seethes under the surface of his measured prose, and the reader perceives a callous slight on Foer’s part. After the encounter at the match, Agovino learns that Foer is starting a soccer blog for The New Republic (Agovino 215). The blog would be “by invitation only,”

Agovino learns, to which he replies: “It felt exclusive and cliquey, everything that soccer, to me, wasn’t. I didn’t own it…but the new ‘thinking fan,’ they didn’t own it either” (215-6).

Foer’s attitude is anathema to Agovino, whose early experiences with soccer taught him to build and cherish friendships with all who professed themselves fans. More significantly,

Foer’s brand of exclusion is “less than a credit to the passion and joy available through the beautiful game” (Tettleton). Exclusion does not further knowledge and understanding of soccer—which, after all, is what every soccer fan should support—therefore it has no value to Agovino.

What is happening between Foer and Agovino is a battle over narrative. Foer sees soccer as an intellectualist pursuit. Agovino combats this attitude and instead clings to a narrative of soccer fandom as a pure pursuit that has an egalitarian and welcoming ethos.

Communication studies scholar Roger Aden writes in Popular Stories and Promised Lands:

Fan Cultures and Symbolic Pilgrimage about “grand narratives” that he sees as facilitating

“the perpetuation of habitus” (4). Those stories are “fueled by imagination” and seek “to make sense of, and to transcend, the seemingly invisible boundaries of the habitus” (Aden 3).

Thus, according to Aden’s reading of “grand narratives,” the stories these two authors tell about the values inherent in soccer fandom are informed by habitus. Aden invokes Pierre

Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, a set of societal factors that make up one’s class association.

Bourdieu argues that “the habitus is not only a structuring structure…but also a structured structure” (Distinction 166). Habitus is “structured” in that it is determined by certain factors in one’s life, and it is “structuring” in that it helps to inform one’s values and aesthetic preferences; everything from the art one appreciates, the music one listens to, the household decorations one likes, and even the food one buys is, according to Bourdieu, “an object of struggle among the classes” (Distinction 41). Thus, the stories Agovino and Foer tell about soccer fandom illuminate the class contexts in which those narratives are formed.

Bourdieu’s own treatise on sport, “How Can One Be a Sports Fan?,” helps to delve deeper into how habitus can influence soccer fandom. The choice to follow soccer and not, for example, American football, is the first classed decision to consider. According to

Bourdieu, “the practice of sports such as tennis, riding, sailing or golf doubtless owes part of its ‘interest’ just as much nowadays as at the beginning, to its distinguishing function and, more precisely, to the gains in distinction which it brings” (“Sports Fan?” 432, Bourdieu’s emphasis). Bourdieu doubtless did not see soccer belonging to this class of sport, as soccer does not (in Bourdieu’s lifetime or today) have the undercurrent of esoterica in France that it does in the United States. Yet we can easily see how the soccer intelligentsia could be seen as chasing distinction through soccer, preferring the European stylishness of soccer to the comparative barbarism of NFL football.

Perhaps, though, soccer’s perceived newness in the United States provides an opportunity for soccer fans to set a new cultural narrative, to construct a cultural utopia. Foer argues that for Americans in the 1980s, soccer “was a tabula rasa, a sport onto which a generation of parents could project their values” (How Soccer Explains 237). Agovino sees a similar lack of cultural heredity in soccer fandom: “This game wouldn’t be passed down to me. I’d have to learn the hard way—or the best way. On my own” (Soccer Diaries 15). The fact that soccer is not culturally loaded yet clearly appeals to Agovino and Foer, and they are not alone in perceiving soccer this way. Blogger Adrian Chen writes in an excellent piece that American soccer fandom appropriates rooting for an “underdog” in sport to the service of nationalism: “For a generation who have watched [overconfidence] in American power lead to disaster, cheering for the U.S. in a contest that we knew we wouldn’t win offers a similar existential thrill. Soccer fandom in America is speculative fiction” (“Reborn in the

USA”). Thus it seems that soccer fans cherish the fact that America lacks the historical frameworks for soccer that European nations have for soccer, or those that America has for its native sports. It’s a chance to set the narratives, or to build those historical frameworks.

For MLS, which began play in 1996 following the spectacle of USA ’94, there has been quite literally a chance to build a new, utopian soccer infrastructure. MLS rejected the

Americanizations of soccer that NASL used, and instead marketed it as similar to the

European game. Teams took on names that mimicked European clubs: for example, D.C.

United emulating many clubs calling themselves United (most famously the Premier

League’s Manchester United), Real Salt Lake emulating Spain’s Real Madrid (though admittedly the lack of any royalty residing in Utah makes the name feel somewhat silly), or the simpler club names like the former Dallas Burn becoming FC Dallas in 2005 or the expansion club New York City FC beginning play in 2015. Moreover, MLS’s insistence that building “soccer-specific stadiums” is vital to the league’s success shows that a chance to build a new infrastructure offers a unique opportunity to chart a new course for the sport in the United States (Love, et. al. 33). American soccer fans create, and the domestic league meets, a demand in American culture for a “soccer specific” city on a hill in which the sin of

NASL—namely, the mimicking of America’s native sports—will not be repeated.

While habitus explains why fans choose soccer over other sports, the division within soccer fandom reveals an uncomfortable pairing of classes grasping for the same cultural object. As Bourdieu says, “sport, like any other practice, is an object of struggles between the fractions of the dominant class and also between the social classes” (“Sports Fan?” 431).

Bourdieu’s emphasis on intra-class as well as inter-class struggles illustrates a parallax observed in soccer debates: from the outside, we see a political class struggle over the value

of soccer to American culture between the generalized group of soccer fans and the Ann

Coulters of the world; from the inside of soccer fandom, we see an aesthetic struggle between the haughty intellectuals and the salt-of-the-earth U.S. soccer fan. What appears to be a simple decision of whether or not someone is impressed by the sport of soccer instead becomes a battleground. It not only matters that you like soccer, but how you like soccer.

“What is at stake,” Bourdieu writes, “is a definition of bourgeois education which contrasts with the petty-bourgeois and academic definition: it is ‘energy,’ ‘courage,’ ‘willpower’…as opposed to knowledge, erudition” (“Sports Fan” 431). Roger Aden observes a tendency to look negatively on this type of classed struggle over narratives: “The relationship between grand narratives and habitus is generally considered to be pessimistic and constraining, one in which the reliance on grand narratives perpetuates what a culture considers ‘common sense’ or ‘the rules’” (Popular Stories 4). Indeed, Boudieu sees these struggles ultimately serving the dominant class. “Everything seems to suggest that, in sport as in music, extension of the public beyond the circle amateurs helps to reinforce the reign of the pure professionals” (“Sports Fan?” 433). Thus, the success of MLS and the growing population of soccer fandom in the United States would serve to encourage the dominant class (in this case, the soccer intelligentsia) to construct “grand narratives” that help them achieve distinction.

In order to adequately consider the classes of fan bases in soccer, I hearken back to the pre-1994 British football world to consider the economic dynamics at play in the marketing of soccer. After the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, England, the government response included a requirement that all professional football venues convert to “all-seated accommodation” (“Lord Taylor’s final report” 76, also noted in Redhead 33).20 The mandate

20 I reiterate that the Hillsborough disaster was not caused by fan misbehavior. See earlier footnote as well as ESPN’s “Hillsborough.” 82

to convert stadiums to all-seaters means the standing-room terraces behind goals like those formerly at Hillsborough marks for soccer fans and authors then end of a “terrace culture”

(Redhead 94). Redhead, Foer, and Nick Hornby all see the “lads” of the terraces being priced out of grounds in the post-Taylor football world. For Redhead, “the traditional soccer culture of yesteryear of participatory, largely male, fandom of the terraces” becomes “threatened by smaller all-seater stadiums, steeply rising prices of admission and the embourgeoisement of the sport” (62, Redhead’s emphasis). Foer explains the shift in economic terms: “to finance the reconstruction of their stadiums, the old owners, mostly small self-made businessmen, imported loads of new capital,” and “the new clientele eroded the old, boisterous working- class ambience” (95-6). In Fever Pitch, canonical to soccer literature, Hornby understands the economics even if he isn’t happy about them:

The big clubs seem to have tired of their fan-base, and in a way who can

blame them? Young working-class and lower-middle-class males bring with

them a complicated and occasionally distressing set of problems; directors and

chairmen might argue that they had their chance and blew it, and that middle-

class families—the new target audience—will not only behave themselves,

but pay much more to do so. (76)

The shift in the makeup of crowds signals an overall shift in the narratives surrounding football fandom in England during the 1990s. Steve Redhead argues that England entered a phase of “post-fandom” in the 1990s, “in which soccer culture has become…privatised or marketised (or for some critics ‘Americanised’)” (Post-Fandom 60). The intrusion of capitalism into the game represents a threat to the very fiber of the game itself for Hornby, as the working-class crowd created the “atmosphere” of a football match, “and atmosphere is

one of the crucial ingredients to the football experience” (77). This changing constituency of

English football is the dominant narrative in Europe at the time the United States was selected as the host country for the 1994 World Cup.

Indeed, a central concern in Europe surrounding USA ’94 was that American culture would influence the game of soccer by an overwhelming media coverage of the event.

Redhead quotes a televised interview with composer and football fan Michael Nyman, who refers to the idea of America getting a World Cup as a “fake and phoney and money oriented” idea (qtd. in Redhead 270). Moreover, Nyman believes that “America is pernicious in the game of football simply because, like a lot of things they take over, they take it over with enthusiasm but actually make it anodyne” (ibid). For Redhead, the reality of America’s alleged takeover of soccer matter less than cultural fears of its possibility. Here, Redhead connects USA ’94 to Jean Baudrillard’s concept of hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that reality itself disappears into technological simulations of reality. “The Real is not just dead,” writes Baudrillard, “it has purely and simply disappeared. In our virtual world, the question of the Real, of the referent, of the subject and its object, can no longer even be posed” (The

Vital Illusion 61-62). In essence, an event becomes so extensively proliferated through media that the reality of that event ceases to functionally exist. “If the Real is disappearing, it is not because of a lack of it—on the contrary, there is too much of it. It is the excess of reality that puts an end to reality” (65-66). This excess results in what Baudrillard calls “the murder of the Real” (61): “Events, real events, will not even have time to take place. Everything will be preceded by its virtual realization” (66-67). Redhead sees this hyperreality in the events of

USA ’94: “USA ’94, ‘World Cup Amerique’ in a sense, could be said to have ‘already taken place’ in terms of its contribution to the global media coverage of soccer” (Post-Fandom 93).

Thus, we see Nyman and Hornby articulating resentments towards the invasion of capitalism into soccer. They saw it as a shift in the fandom of soccer: for Hornby, a shift from working- class men to middle and upper-class families present at games; for Nyman, a blatant money- grab in the form of bringing international soccer to a capitalist paradise in the United States.

For Foer and Agovino, though, American involvement and a bourgeois fan base seem to have been foregone conclusions. One could point to their American habitus as an explanation, or perhaps their late entry to the game relative to Hornby and Nyman; whatever the explanation, they seem comfortable with the influence of economics on soccer. Indeed, having that comfort level is a practical approach to the game. Bourdieu writes that “without doing too much violence to reality, it is possible to consider the whole range of sporting activities and entertainment offered to social agents…as a supply intended to meet a social demand” (“Sports Fan?” 428, Bourdieu’s emphasis). For Bourdieu, sport itself serves an economic function at some level. Moreover, the equivalence between American engagement and economic intrusion is undermined by Bourdieu’s observation that “the shift from games to sports in the strict sense took place in the educational establishments reserved for the

‘elites’ of bourgeois society, the English public schools” (“Sports Fan?” 429). Bourgeois appropriation of sport, according to Bourdieu, is an English invention. Furthermore, Foer notes that the narrative of the gentrification of English football fandom is overstated: “Even in posh West London, perhaps the most yuppie stretch in the whole of Britain, Chelsea still manages to draw a largely working-class crowd. The main difference is that it’s an integrated crowd” (How Soccer Explains 97). Even those fans who buy tickets professing to mourn the loss of the purer days of working-class crowds are still participating in the economic machinery of the game. Marcus Free and John Hughson argue in the International Journal of

Cultural Studies that “spectators really are ‘supporters’ since their support contributes materially to ‘purchasing’ players through ticket prices and corporeally through number and vocality, and may influence outcomes” (“Common Culture” 88). Navigation of the purity of the game’s values—what Hornby identifies as “atmosphere,” but may also include things like competition, victory, fair play, nationalism, and team spirit—is essential to the perpetuation of sport as a cultural good. Sport stands side by side with art in Bourdieu’s vision of “cultural goods,” the success of which relies on “an entirely improbable, and in any case rarely achieved, combination of the realism implying minor concessions to ‘economic’ necessities…and the conviction which excludes them” (“The Production of Belief” 75-6).

What Bourdieu suggests here is a middle course between idealism and pure capitalism;

Bourdieu speaks of the enterprises of art dealers and publishers, but the theory applies to sport as well; as a cultural product, its value relies on the ability of owners to sell ideals of fan loyalty and the promises of victory to its fans, and in return the fans must acknowledge and forgive the economic realities that those owners face. For owners, this means they cannot admit to purely economic interest in the club but must appear to pursue victory; for fans, this can mean turning a blind eye to an owner divesting its best player or raising ticket prices. The persistence of the club depends on both reactions.

For American soccer writers like Agovino and Foer, it’s unclear what this economic duality means. The economic reality they face is that the popular soccer fandom resents the soccer intelligentsia, and in turn, the soccer intelligentsia scoffs at the masses in the stands, and this class conflict represents a pervasive cultural narrative that undermines what should be the goal of both groups—namely, the continuation and advancement of quality soccer in the United States. It seems that these two groups quietly invert the class struggles of English

football fandom that precede America’s entrée into the global game. That is, the wave of white-collar fandom taking over English football stadiums is paralleled in the American game by the uninitiated, anti-intelligentsia dilettantes who pack “soccer-specific” stadiums in the U.S., while the fading working-class football lad of Nick Hornby’s fond memory parallels the elitist, yuppie, preening soccer intellectual who seeks to exclude the former group.

What remains is to identify who benefits from negotiating the divide and how they manage it. ESPN has a clear monetary stake in the increased popularity of the game in the

United States, as does MLS and its club owners. I suggest now that an investment in international soccer—that is, competition between national teams, as opposed to league competition—has successfully united the two groups. The World Cup is consistently the most watched soccer event in the United States, and the fact that the U.S. team has qualified for each World Cup since USA ’94 has kept U.S. fans interested. Moreover, the massive interest in the World Cup creates a demand which bloggers, writers, podcasters, and any other incarnations of the soccer intelligentsia rush to fill. Even if Foer’s blog (as mentioned in Agovino) is exclusionary, other publications have stepped in more recently to supply soccer fans with intelligent commentary. Everyone seems to benefit from the World Cup, and the networks are eager to keep selling.

“I Believe That We Will Win:” Conclusion

In 2014, as ESPN ramped up its soccer programming in preparation for the World

Cup in Brazil, they aired a brief documentary-style narrative called “The History of I

Believe.” The program detailed a popular chant among fans of the United States Men’s

National Team. The chant itself is simple, a call-and-response cheer that builds word by word

until the crowd chants “I believe that we will win!” repeatedly, often accompanied by drums and rhythmic bouncing from the crowd. From the point of view of other nations, it may indicate an irrational confidence in a team that has been consistently outclassed by European and South American sides, or worse, an American sense of entitlement. For Dan Wiersema of the American Outlaws, a group of supporters of the United States team, the chant represents an optimistic outlook on American soccer. Quoted in the “History of I Believe” video, Wiersema says that “we are a young soccer nation. We don’t have a past to dwell on; we have a future to look forward to. The ‘I Believe’ chant is just something that encompasses our endless optimism about this national team and our hopes and prayers as a soccer nation.”

However, Wiersema represents exactly the way that ESPN is uniting competing classes of

American soccer fans. Wiersema appears on screen from the shoulders up; he wears a red shirt, with what appears to be an American flag kerchief or buff around his neck. He wears black-rimmed glasses with rectangular lenses, and his red hair is parted on his right side and swept lazily across his forehead. Scruffy red facial hair somewhere between a five o’clock shadow and a full-fledged beard shades his soft jawline. He has been chosen to represent the

American Outlaws for this video because he represents what either American Outlaws or

ESPN wish to convey about American soccer fandom. He looks trendy and vaguely intellectual, and he speaks with clarity and evident emotional investment. He’s intelligent and patriotic, nationalistic and yet countercultural. It’s safe to say that pop-culture aware

Americans would quickly arrive at the label of “hipster” for Wiersema. Somehow, he has turned the shirtless, belly-painted NFL fan’s pride into a brand of flag-waving that snuggles up to intellectualism and sophistication. He has become the embodiment of what Foer describes as “the discreet charm of bourgeois nationalism” (193). Foer uses the term to

describe what he sees as an innovative and attractive aesthetic of FC Barcelona, who encourage a Catalonian pride in their fans, but also a welcoming and humanistic spirit.

However, when Foer uses the word “bourgeois,” he refers to an aesthetic rather than a specific habitus. The “bourgeois nationalism” that Wiersema embodies is the latter. He unites the Starbucks regular with the jingoistic patriot, and, in time, his particular brand of soccer fandom might even one day assuage Ann Coulter’s fears of that sinister European game. The tabula rasa that is soccer in America allows us to critically examine the way twentieth and twenty-first century Americans have constructed American soccer fandom. The integration struggle of baseball does not need to be repeated in contemporary American culture, but another kind of division emerges as the sport’s nascent following reveals a battle for class ownership of the game that is settled, more or less, through a constructed, cooperative, and unifying identity. Finally, the importance of the U.S. soccer team to the national fan base’s survival reveals that constructing American identity is what American identity is all about.

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VITA

Personal Matthew Scott Tettleton Background Born June 5, 1984, Dallas, Texas Son of Michael Allen Tettleton and Lallay Codguicher Tettleton Married Meghan Anne Champney May 12, 2012

Education Diploma, James Martin High School, Arlington, Texas, 2002 Bachelor of Arts, English, Summa Cum Laude, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, 2010 Master of Arts, Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, 2015

Experience Graduate Teaching Assistant, Texas Christian University, Fall 2013-Spring 2015 Writing Tutor, University of Texas at Arlington Writing Center, Spring 2009-Fall 2010

Publications “Lunch Pails and Thugs.” Winner of the 2014 Lyle Olsen Graduate Student Essay Award. Forthcoming in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature.

Professional Modern Language Association Memberships Sport Literature Association

ABSTRACT

BETWEEN THESE LINES: THE FIELD OF PLAY IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

by Matthew Scott Tettleton, M.A., 2015 Department of English Texas Christian University

Thesis Advisor: David Colón, Associate Professor of English

This project addresses the role of sport in creating and revealing American identity. The texts that are highlighted are Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,

August Wilson’s Fences, Michael Agovino’s The Soccer Diaries, and Franklin Foer’s How

Soccer Explains the World. The sports that are highlighted are basketball, baseball, and soccer. These texts make visible divisions that are inherent in American identity and reflected in American sports: nationality, race, and class. By examining these texts, scholars can critically examine the role sport plays in constructing, reinforcing, and at times breaking cultural boundaries constructed along lines of nation, race, and class. As a powerful and popular cultural form in contemporary America, sport has the ability to guide the construction of national identity, and stories about sport can reveal the way contemporary

American culture has been influenced by that process of identity construction.