Players All Performances in Contemporary Sport

"Players All is a stunning accomplishment, an agenda-setting work; it opens the space for a bold, and innovative, critical, performance-based discourse on mass sport, sport as entertainment, and spectatorship in the global, postmodern society." --Norman K. Denzin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

In a book that is both scholarly and engagingly personal, Robert E. Rinehart takes us into the world of contemporary sport performances, from the Olympic Games to "The eXtreme Games," the Super Bowl to "The American Gladiators." He introduces us to sports tourism and the highly commercialized world of global sport. Rinehart analyzes the emergence of such "sports" as paint ball (and its associations with the Vietnam War) and indoor rock climbing (and its links to environmentalism and self-mastery). He shows how sports have become theatrical events and paints a revealing portrait of the new postmodern culture of sports.

Written for an advanced, knowledgeable, sociologist audience, this critique of sport and games may be a difficult read for many people. Using the language of postmodernism, with its attitude of superiority, Rinehart seeks to show that in contemporary sport contests the audience and media are also players. He advances the thesis of sport as an avant--garde metaphor rather than sport as drama, providing observational evidence to support his claim. Rinehart draws on interviews, observations, and academic background as an independent scholar in his investigation of contests as varied as American Gladiators, paint ball, the Super Bowl, and the eXtreme Games. This is a slow moving and less than playful look, through the lens of postmodernism, at today's sport scene. Graduate students, faculty, and researcherD. M. Furst, San Jose State University, 1999dec CHOICE. Indiana University Press Indiana University Press

ROBERT E. RINEHART is Independent Scholar. He has taught courses in Physical Education and Dance at Idaho State. His work has appeared in Sociology of Sport Journal, Aethlon, Journal of Sport History, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and Cultural Studies.

Foreword

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction

2. Dropping Hierarchies: Toward the Study of a Contemporary Sporting Avant-Garde

3. Sport and Kitsch: A Case Study of The American Gladiators

4. Sport as Avant-Garde: A Case Study of the World Wrestling Federation

5. Sport as Epiphanic Marker: The Case of Super Bowl XXVI (26)

6. Sport as Postmodern Construction: A Case Study of Paintball

7. Sport as Constructed Audience: A Case Study of ESPN's The eXtreme Games

8. Sport as Postmodern Tourism: Warp Speed in Barcelona (Olympism, Ideology, and Experience)

Notes

Index