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NWSA Journal 13.2 (2001) 206-210



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Book Review

Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport

Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation


Whatever It Takes: Women on Women's Sport edited by Joli Sandoz and Joby Winans. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999, 324 pp., $13.00 paper.

Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation edited by Susan Birrell and Mary G. McDonald. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000, 326 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. [End Page 206]

The Sydney Olympics belonged to women. They began with Cathy Freeman, the adored Australian aboriginal track star, lighting the Olympic cauldron during the opening ceremonies. Daily we feasted on images of big, fast, powerful athletic women on the track, water, fields, basketball court, volleyball sand, and elsewhere. The Sydney Games commemorated 100 years of women competing in the modern Olympics with more women (38.3 percent) taking part than ever before. Women competed in 25 of 28 sports with only boxing, wrestling, and baseball closed to them. Of the 35 nations who sent no women to Atlanta four years ago, seventeen had female competitors in Sydney. Equality on this stage is not yet complete, but we are closer than ever before.

Along with increased media attention and a developing global focus, the past decade has witnessed an explosion of writing, both scholarly and popular, about women's sport. There is no danger of these works taking over the often meager sports section of your local bookstore, still replete with ghostwritten autobiographies of even the most journeymen of male athletes, and the rehashed seasons of the big four--baseball, basketball, football, and hockey--yet progress is slow and steady. The two books reviewed here represent quite opposite ends of the literature on women's sport. Although they are both works of nonfiction, one contains first-person accounts of women's experiences in sports, whereas the other is scholarly, analytical, and critical. The difference is not unlike the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's (CBC) coverage of the Sydney Olympics versus that of NBC in the United States. Where the CBC went live (virtually all day), interspersed with intelligent interviews and news updates, NBC chose tape delay at prime time in order to recast and restructure the events.

Like all live television events, surprise and raw emotion permeate Whatever It Takes. The 56 pieces cover an enormous range of sports (although softball/baseball, basketball, swimming, and track and field are favored), and like the earlier, fictional companion volume, A Whole Other Ball Game (Sandoz 1997), the focus is on competitive rather than recreational sports. About a third of the pieces were written for this volume, with the remainder published previously. Among the authors are several Pulitzer Prize winners, book award, and poetry prize recipients like Madeleine Blais, Annie Dillard, Maxine Kumin, Diane Ackerman, Jewelle Gomez, and Colleen J. McElroy. There are also names we associate with the best writing in contemporary women's sport: Mariah Burton Nelson, Leslie Heywood, Madeleine Blais, Rene Denfeld, Pat Griffin, and Sara Corbett. One expects the professional writers in the collection to write well, but so do the less well-known and presumably less experienced contributors. There is not a bad writer among them.

Several themes emanate from the diverse pieces. Many are about women's [End Page 207] self-discovery through sport, learning the power of their physicality, or simply reclaiming their bodies. Pat Griffin remembers the joy (and pain) of standing up to a bully as the only girl on her summer baseball team. Rene Denfeld, a licensed amateur boxer, knows the violence of the ring--being pounded in the body, punched in the head, sparring in training, fighting for real--and Anne Alexander describes how bicycle racing brings out her "killer instinct." Deborah Abbott, her leg shrunk by childhood polio, writes poignantly about becoming a "jock."

More than 25 years ago, Title IX mandated equal opportunity for boys and girls in education, including sports. Several writers note its positive effect, yet...

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