To date, scholars have side-stepped examining the applicability of the Anti-Blowout thesis in parallel sports. This essay is an attempt to test this construct in the context of endurance footraces. After a review of the central tenets of Dixon's definition of the Anti-Blowout thesis, I will provide a sketch of what blowouts look like in footraces including a description of a secured victory and the subsequent creation of a wide margin of victory. Conclusions suggest that opportunities do exist for runners to malevolently run others into the ground, although efforts to remedy such actions are challenging due to the structure of the footrace practice.

In the days following Super Bowl III, New York Times columnist Robert Lipsyte coined the phrase 'superbowling'. Consisting of the 'chatter' and diverse perspectives voiced throughout the nation in the days surrounding each Super Bowl, superbowling includes the off-the-wall psychiatric evaluations and epic gloating by football fans, political reactions and sociological analyses concerning the game's affect on the nation's institutions, as well as the hasty generalizations by alarmed moralists and university professors. This paper utilizes the 'superbowling' penned between Super Bowls I and XXXVI as evidence that provides insight into 'the variety of ways in which Americans understood and enacted their political culture at a specific time'. By investigating the varieties of superbowling topics highlighted within each yearly Super Bowl, one cannot only better understand the evolution of Super Bowl Sunday, but can also understand its relationship to the prominent historical happenings and personalities of the time. It is concluded that by the turn of the millennium, superbowling revealed at least three enduring qualities of Super Bowl Sunday: 'conspicuous consumption', 'shared experience', and 'national holiday'.

On 15 January 1967, the National Football League (NFL) and the American Football League (AFL) staged the first AFL-NFL World Championship Game, a contest that would soon become known in common parl...

"The International Journal of the History of Sport, Regional Numbers." The International Journal of the History of Sport, 25(3), p. 313

Endurance athletes work at creating habits and lifestyles which correspond to Aristotle's notion of eudomania (human flourishing). They spend time and energy dedicating themselves to their craft. They relinquish other interests in pursuit of excellence. They fully accept William James' notion of precipitousness as they create goals and work toward achievement. In this paper, we examine normative issues related to endurance sport participation, the potential dark side of this pursuit of excellence. Our overriding concern is how best to work toward and experience human flourishing while simultaneously remaining attentive to relationships and responsibilities. In terms of potential perils associated with endurance sport, we address questions of autonomy, authenticity and identification. We contend that endurance athletes concerned with these questions benefit from transcendental and pragmatic notions of the good life.

Massengale's Trends Toward the Future of Physical Education (1987) makes no reference to the existence of the philosophic inquiry of physical activity within higher education kinesiology programseven though the sub-discipline had been formalized by academics in the early 1970s. In contrast, Massengale and Swanson's The History of Exercise and Sport Science (1997) dedicated a chapter to sport philosophy's development, including a prognosis of its future. Since then, there has been tremendous growth in the sub-discipline, including an increase in publication outlets, stand-alone monographs, and the creation of academic associations globally. Yet this growth has not necessarily secured sport philosophy's place in higher education curriculum. In this article, we briefly review the history of philosophic inquiry into physical activity and review previous predictions of the sub-discipline's future before offering our own prognostication of its future in higher education.

This book provides an inter-disciplinary examination of the relationship between sport, spirituality and religion. It covers a wide-range of topics, such as prayer and sport, religious and spiritual perspectives on athletic identity and ‘flow’ in sport, theological analysis of genetic performance enhancement technologies, sectarianism in Scottish football, a spiritual understanding of sport psychology consultancy in English premiership soccer and how Zen may be useful in sports performance and participation. As modern sport is often intertwined with commercial and political agendas, this book also provides an important corrective to the “win at all costs” culture of modern sport, which cannot always be fully understood through secular ethical inquiry. This is a unique and important addition to the current literature for a wide-range of fields including theology and religious studies, psychology, health studies, ethics and sports studies.

In this article, I will argue that any well-conceived Christian theology of disability sport must include a modern and diverse perspective on the Pauline concept of “flesh.” In support of my suggestion, I historically consider Christian conceptions of “flesh” and “body” as well as review the more modern perspective provided by John A. T. Robinson in his work, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology. Considerations of prosthetics, orthotics, and wheelchairs phenomenologically as human-made “flesh,” and their use in the augmentation of God-given flesh in disability sport, are then examined. These considerations are followed by a discussion of the place of these types of “flesh” amidst the notion of the “supercrip” and the potential for super-human performances. My conclusions suggest that, while athletes with disability sometimes enhance their God-given flesh with human-made “flesh” for the sake of athletic participation, this enhancement should not necessarily be viewed as an overemphasis on the spiritual shortcomings of the flesh delineated historically by the Apostle Paul or by specific modern Christian doctrine. Rather, the flesh found in disability sport today—whether God-given or human-made—can be interpreted as a more inclusive depiction of the God-given flesh noted in biblical times modernized to include the ever-progressive development of disability technology.

In his recent work, 'Sport, Aesthetic Experience, and Art as the Ideal Embodied Metaphor', Tim L. Elcombe explores links between sport and art from a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience. However, Elcombe's work does not highlight the role of the imagination in the interpretation of the aesthetic something Michael Polanyi claims to be the 'cornerstone of aesthetic theory'. With the backdrop of an increased interest in the aesthetics, phenomenology, and epistemology of sport, this discussion essay seeks to defend the usefulness and value of definitional demarcation debates between sport and art, to use Polanyi's distinctions among technical, scientific and artistic problems to support the claim that sport is not art, and to offer an account of how sport contributes in its own way to human flourishing and why it is no less valuable experientially than art.

During the practice sessions for the 1932 Olympic bobsled events, Lake Placid’s Mt. Van Hoevenberg slide endured multiple crashes involving over a dozen athletes. An analysis of the slide from inception to construction to competition as well as the resulting management of the accidents produces significant historical insight into the administration of the winter Olympic games. Using David Welky’s paradigm suggesting that the analyses of ordinary Olympic happenings can be used to probe larger issues, this analysis uses the “seemingly mundane” happenings of facility construction and competition to provide historical insight into an attempt to use the Olympics as a promotional springboard to a host city’s future commercial success. As the first sliding facility built in North America dedicated to both an Olympic games and for future commercial programming, this analysis also provides significant historical insight into modern Olympic issues including the fiduciary conundrum of building Olympic facilities with potentially limited post-Olympic commercial possibilities, the sometimes contentious nature of a host city’s environmental stewardship and the final location of those facilities as it pertains to the facilities’ future commercial success, and the nationalistic-laden gamesmanship that often plays out on these facilities during the administration of practice sessions and Olympic competition that can result in decision-making that potentially jeopardizes the safety of the athlete.

In this paper, we ethically examine the value of dichotomies to the endurance community or any sports community bifurcated by attitudes of superiority in one qualitative method of experiencing an activity over another—as Pearl Izumi's 2007 advertising campaign “We are not joggers” has done by dividing the bipedal ambulatory endurance community into “runners” and “joggers.” Using the writings of American pragmatists William James and John Dewey, we will describe the endurance sports community in terms of “unsympathetic characters” and “sympathetic characters.” We will then layer conceptions of the “static” self and the “dynamic” self on top of this dichotomy. The results of this examination will not support Pearl Izumi's dichotomy in “static” ways. However, if these perspectives are viewed as exemplifying a temporal measure of the “dynamic” self, as part of the endurance athletes' personal narratives, then actions and attitudes based on these dichotomies can be seen as part of meaningful personal and community growth as well as a potential source of virtue.

Using the classical pragmatic traditions of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Josiah Royce, and others, Pragmatism and the Philosophy of Sport sheds new light on the meaning of phy...

Philosophic inquiry into the mental states of elite athletes during skilled motor performance continues to grow. In contrast to the bulk of these works that focus almost exclusively on skillful performance, this paper examines athletic motor behavior from a point of inexactness or even failure in athletic performance. Utilizing the works of Michael Polanyi, who believed that both ideas of achievement and failure were equally necessary to understand the behavior of living things and their physical actions, I examine the notion of failure as a framework to scrutinize the cognitive processes occurring during the development and performance of skilled motor behavior. After reviewing Polanyi's conceptions of personal knowing to locate the source of inaccuracy in human activity, I present Polanyi's distinction between two kinds of mistakes and apply each to inaccurate sport performance. I then suggest that mistakes in sport should be re-conceptualized beyond their current negative connotations. Instead, conceptions of mistakes should also include respect for man's most distinguished act' that being the production of knowledge. From this expanded perspective, the value of inexact motor performance can be found in addition to notions of uncertainty and skill development in what Polanyi calls metaphysical implication of a groping for reality'. In some final thoughts, I will suggest future implications of the value of the inexact on broader sport issues.

In his article, ‘Recovering Humanity: Movement, Sport, and Nature’, Doug Anderson addresses the place of endurance sport, or more generally sport at large, as a potential catalyst for the good life. Anderson contrasts transcendental themes of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson with the pragmatic claims of William James and John Dewey, who focus on human possibility and growth. Our aim is to pursue the pragmatic line of thought championed by James and Dewey as a contrasting but not mutually exclusive motive to Anderson’s analysis. We contend that movement can provide humanizing possibilities even more pronounced for those subscribing to pragmatic themes (i.e., growth and the strenuous mood). We will use running and cycling to demonstrate how the strenuous mood enhances the possibility for this humanizing condition. Specifically, we argue that moving in a committed fashion allows us to deepen our relationship with the respective practice and thus opens the possibilities for ‘recovering our humanity’.

Book Review| October 01 2012 Sport As a Spiritual Practice: Mastery, Failure, and Transcendence in the Life of Athletes Hutch, Richard. Sport As a Spiritual Practice: Mastery, Failure, and Transcendence in the Life of Athletes. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2010. Pp. x+199. Bibliography and index. $129.95 hb. Peter M. Hopsicker Peter M. Hopsicker The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona College Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Sport History (2012) 39 (3): 544–545. https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.39.3.544 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Peter M. Hopsicker; Sport As a Spiritual Practice: Mastery, Failure, and Transcendence in the Life of Athletes. Journal of Sport History 1 January 2012; 39 (3): 544–545. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jsporthistory.39.3.544 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of Sport History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 University of Illinois Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.