Deconstructing the Gentleman Amateur (article version)
- ️https://hud.academia.edu/DuncanStone
Related papers
2014
As a core and enduring ideal that influenced sports throughout the world for over a century, amateurism has long fascinated scholars. While historians have examined the social origins of amateurism within its institutional seedbed in Britain, the subject has proven resistant to extensive scholarly analysis. Many questions still remain unanswered: What were the mechanisms that took amateurism around the world? How was amateurism received outside of Britain? Was amateurism a monolithic, homogenous term? Or, alternatively, was it malleable, selective and fluid, transforming itself within and across national boundaries? A coordinated effort by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the popular British newspaper, Sporting Life, attempted to craft a universal amateur definition across all sports in the aftermath of the controversial 1908 Olympic games in London. The IOC’s difficulties in establishing an international consensus in the years prior to the Great War revealed that amate...
The ‘male preserve’ thesis, sporting culture, and men’s power
Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies, 2019
Introduction: Studying sport and gender Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the modern Westernised form of competition sport took shape, there has been a shifting yet robustly gendered structure to the experience of playing, consuming, managing, teaching and marketing sport. In this regard, save for a number of important examples, sports in various forms were created by men, for men (and boys). In light of this, critical studies of men, masculinity and sport culture have emerged as a major area of research in the sociology of sport (e.g.
Chapter 1 - Introducing the Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Sport
The Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Sport, 2019
In this chapter, we introduce the Palgrave Handbook of Masculinity and Sport, outlining the historical relationship between the two. We begin by discussing the early study of masculinity and sport, and how this evolved over the 20 th century. Next, we discuss the emergence of a significant body of research documenting how sport's relationship between masculinity has changed since the turn of the millennium-largely due to the decline of cultural homophobia across a range of sporting settings. We then outline how readers of the Handbook can utilize its content most effectively, before introducing the biographies of each editor.
The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2014
Ordinary sports clubs and their annual sports have been largely ignored by historians of sport, whose focus has been largely on more mega-events and on larger clubs, and on the twentieth century rather than earlier periods. This paper provides a rare case study of a local athletic sports meeting, in late Victorian and early Edwardian northeast England, using club records, newspaper, census and other record-linkage material, and setting it in its local and national context. By doing so it shows how it is possible to shed light on its organisation and club membership; the age, status and home locations of competitors, and the linkages with other athletic and cycling clubs in the area. More importantly it also explores the vexed question of the ways in which amateurism functioned in areas less influenced by the middle classes of the metropolis and elite clubs, which have hitherto dominated discussion.
This paper critically examines the life and career of Daniel “Dan” Maskell OBE CBE (1908-92), the much-loved British professional coach and BBC commentator for Wimbledon, and position his social ascendancy during the inter-war and post-war periods within the contexts of shifting class relations in British society, and the professionalisation of tennis and growing performance orientation of amateur tennis authorities in Britain. Given his working-class origins, Maskell’s gradual acceptance into the British lawn tennis fraternity and rise to become “the voice of Wimbledon” and, for some, the personification of traditional British sporting amateur values, was something of an enigma, and reflected key contradictions in what amateurism constituted in the twentieth century. Despite enduring systematic discrimination in clubs and exclusion from amateur competitions, as a consequence of him being a “professional”, he remained a chief proponent of the amateur ideology throughout his lifetime and exhibited numerous personal qualities that endeared him to the upper-middle-class establishment: modesty, loyalty, integrity, conservative views on player behaviour, deference to authority, strong work-ethic, and good-humoured nature. Once tennis went “open” in 1968, and throughout a period when professionalism and commercialism threatened to undermine the sports’ core ideals, Maskell continued to represent and promote amateur ideals through his broadcasting ethics and values.
Book review: British sporting literature and culture in the long eighteenth century
2016
In recent years the vast majority of historians of sport have shown relatively little interest in the long eighteenth century, preferring to concentrate on the more recent past, and largely abandoning the field to specialists in literature such as John Whale or David Nash, or mainstream historians like Wolfgang Behringer Emma Griffin, Rebekka Mallinckrodt, or Angela Schattner. They have shed new light on a period which has been tentatively suggested by many scholars including Allen Guttmann and Norbert Elias to have seen the origins of modern sport.