MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

The sports biography is a staple of the biography genre. Every year, athletes are commissioned to recall their lives, careers, trials and tribulations. Since 1970, when Jim Bouton’s Ball Four created a stir, breaking the “clubhouse code” to reveal the actual inner workings of the locker room, biographies of male athletes have showcased the debauchery of professional sports along with striking the traditional notes of teamwork, camaraderie, and hard work. Yet the same cannot be said for female athletes’ biographies. Locker room gentility still rules the women’s sports world, despite progress made since the institution of Title IX. Most female athletes’ biographies cater to younger audiences, predominantly elementary and middle-school girls, highlighting teamwork and fair play, while also providing notes on proper leadership. Women’s low representation in books for adult audiences coincides with their diminished opportunities for professional athletic careers, participation in amateur sports, and financial opportunities for women in sports and sports journalism. These differences in sports biographies reflect differences in class as well. Bouton’s memoir and its descendants revealed the discrepancies between working-class masculinity and its middle-class brother that had previously dominated sports writing. Yet women’s sports biographies are trapped in the old model of family-friendly narratives and lessons learned on the field that are easily translated into life away from it. This presentation will focus on changes in women’s sport participation related to and following the introduction of Title IX, and the rhetoric surrounding female participation in sports as an extension of Second Wave Feminist ideals that predominantly targeted and benefited white, middle and upper-middle class women. The goal of this paper is to contribute to a fuller understanding of sports media’s role in constructing athlete’s reputations, and the gendered limitations still present.