CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS
Double Crossover: Gender, Politics, and Performance in Basketball
Basketball is a vibrant cultural text and set of practices to examine various shifts and struggles related to labor, identity, industry, and media within today’s postmodern global landscape. As the world’s second most popular team sport (and the most-watched team sport at the Summer Olympics), basketball brings more than 450 million players to the court around the world, and even more inside of arenas, in front of TVs, or through streaming devices each year.[1] This transnational facet of basketball, rife with geopolitical impact makes it a slippery, constantly moving phenomenon. At the same time, it also operates as a practice of expression, imagination, and emotion as it traverses across borders of geography, identity, and culture.
Throughout this book project, I employ the metaphor of the crossover, a spectacular basketball move, to describe how Black women and non-binary athletes maneuver through a sporting industry not designed with them in mind. While it isn’t as flashy as a dunk or as violent as a block, the crossover is about agility, balance, and deception. It demands rapid lateral movement with seemingly little effort. It also requires a particular sense of poise and control to challenge an opponent’s balance, leaving adversaries helpless as they flail, trip, or crash to the ground (referred to on the court as “breaking ankles”). The crossover relies upon an athlete knowing where they are on the court and where they need to go. Shifting from one side to the other rapidly and following an internal rhythm, the well-timed crossover allows one to create space for themselves and their teammates, ultimately allowing for a clear path to the basket.
In taking up the crossover as a conceptual framework centering Black athletes, specifically those who identify as women or nonbinary, I argue that the experiences and strategies cultivated by these athletes provide an instructive lens into the proliferation of basketball as a site of global labor, media, and spectacle. Players, journalists, coaches, and executives navigate, negotiate, and resist countless boundaries and obstacles. Amid institutional and economic inequities and gendered and racialized stereotypes, they create community and generate new forms of knowledge—new means of maneuvering, wiggling in and out and around defenders, sidestepping opponents, and as some would say on the basketball court, "putting the world on skates."
[1]. “Facts and Figures,” FIBA.basketball, accessed August 15, 2018, http://www.fiba.basketball/presentation.
TAKE THAT FOR DATA: ADVANCED ANALYTICS IN SPORTS
In 2017, David Fizdale, head coach of the National Basketball Association’s Memphis Grizzlies, sat down for a post-game press conference following a first-round playoff game against the San Antonio Spurs. Fizdale, in his first season as a head coach, acknowledged his team’s effort in the 96-82 loss but spent the majority of the presser admonishing the officiating crew. He noted the number of times his players went to the free throw line versus their opponents, with the most staggering statistic being the Spurs’ Kawhi Leonard’s 19 free throws compared to the Grizzlies approaching the line a mere 15 times for the entire game. “I’m not a numbers guy,” Fizdale says, “but that doesn’t seem to add up.” He then goes on to note that the “numbers” speak to a larger disrespect of his roster and his own status as a newer face in the league — this is something that he sees beyond the box score. “I know Pop’s got pedigree and I’m a young rookie, but they’re not going to rook us,” Fizdale declares, accentuating his raucous reading of the the referees with a final phrase, “Take that for data!” Fizdale runs down the numbers and analyzes them through the political and cultural norms of the league — whiny players get more calls (whereas he describes a player on his team, Mike Conley, as having “class”) and seasoned coaches get heard as they scream on the sidelines for calls. To understand the Grizzlies’ loss solely through how many times they got to the line would be to miss out on crucial aspects of the game itself.
The phrase rapidly circulated across the sports twittersphere, instantly meme’d and ripe for spreadability. Shea Serrano of The Ringer published an article titled “Twenty-five Completely Reasonable Uses of David Fizdale’s ’Take That for Data’”; meanwhile, the Memphis Grizzlies promptly printed shirts with the phrase available for purchase in their arena. Beyond its lifespan across social media, the phrase seemingly reflects a growing contention in sport between the so-called “eye test” — that is the cultural and embodied knowledge acquired through participating and experiencing sport — and the use of advanced analytics — the evolution of statistical data used to predict and enhance sports performance. This book is located at the intersection of these tensions, many which have intrigued me for some time. I am grateful to David Fizdale for providing the backdrop to this project and an apt title to boot.
Over the last decade, advanced analytics positions have proliferated across each of the men’s major professional leagues. Far beyond the bounds of Billy Beane’s Moneyball, advanced analytics have dominated sports headlines, whether rebuked by former athletes turned halftime analysts, or the source of concern following the hacking of a pro team’s data by a former employee. Big data in sport is driven by the following questions — who owns it, who can access it, and how it can be used. It has opened up an entire market for sports fanatics to consume sport, as well as technology developed by companies to further quantify athletic achievement.
We speak of smart homes, cities, and cars but in sport there is a growing emphasis on the smart body, team, and arena. Teams are formed in part by algorithm and sensors living beneath areas floors, feeling inevitable given the technological takeover which permeates our lives. It is worth taking stock of the role of this technology and our perceptions of those who create and wear it.
THE SOUND OF VICTORY: MUSIC, SPORT, AND SOCIETY
The Sound of Victory (SOV) is an interdisciplinary, multi-platform project dedicated to investigating the deeply-intertwined relationship between music and sport. Led by Courtney M. Cox and Perry B. Johnson, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Media at Risk and the Annenberg Center for Collaborative Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, SOV interrogates the historical intersection of music and sport to further explore questions of citizenship, community, history, and culture, with a particular focus on issues of authenticity, identity, belonging, space/place, mythology, inclusion/exclusion, power and political economy. Bridging interdisciplinary research projects, multimedia productions, and public events, SOV seeks to foster connections between faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students from UO, USC, and beyond, with key actors from across the music and sporting industries. SOV works to address key gaps in music and sport knowledge by providing resources for researchers, students, and educators, and sharing new insights into the historical connection between music and sport through the publication of research, and the organization of related programs, panels, and events.
SOV considers such questions as: What is the historical relationship between music and sport? How do musical and sporting intersections (in)form historical and contemporary understandings of space and place? How can we reimagine the “politics of play” through examinations of music and sport? How can an interrogation of music and sport together offer us new understandings of culture and history? How does the study and analysis of music and sport—as intertwined spheres of entertainment—offer an under-researched entry point for new theoretical and intellectual contributions to such fields as: Music, Sport, Communication, Cultural Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Performance Studies, Media Studies, and Feminist Theory?