The Inaugural Social Sciences Week Great Debate: Does Sport Unite or Divide Us?
Left to Right: David Rowe, Ginger Gorman and Andrew Leigh
This debate was organised by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, with support from Synergy Group, as part of Social Sciences Week 2023. It was held at the National Library of Australia, Canberra on 5 September 2023, during its Grit & Gold: Tales from a Sporting Nation Exhibition (9 June 2023–28 January 2024).
The debaters were Emeritus Professor David Rowe, FASSA, FAHA, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University and the Hon Dr Andrew Leigh MP, FASSA, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury and Assistant Minister for Employment. Moderator Ginger Gorman, journalist and author, asked before the speeches for an indication of audience sentiment through a show of hands – a substantial majority felt that ‘Sport Unites Us’. After a coin toss, David spoke first and argued for the ‘divide’ case and Andrew in favour of ‘unite’. Ginger then asked questions of the speakers and managed contributions from the audience.
Three judges responded in turn: Academy President Professor Richard Holden, UNSW; Associate Professor Catherine Ordway, sport and integrity expert, University of Canberra; and Chloe Hosking, Professional Cyclist, Olympian, Commonwealth Champion and Paralegal at Synergy Group.
The audience of approximately 120 people then voted, with a substantial majority in favour of the proposition that ‘Sport Divides Us’ and the trophy was awarded.
The debate was recorded for broadcast by ABC Radio National’s Big Ideas program: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/bigideas
We are sharing the unexpurgated version of David’s talk from the evening. If you would like to read Andrew Leigh’s talk, a revised and reduced version has been made available on Open Forum.
David Rowe with two members of the Afghanistan Women’s Cricket Team who attended the debate, Shafiqa Noorzai (left) and Benafsha Hashimi (right). Picture: Abra Pressler, Australian Academy of the Humanities
Resources
Event Link: https://socialsciencesweek.org.au/event/the-great-debate-does-sport-unite-or-divide-us/
Presentation I
Sport: Socially Divided, Spuriously Unified?
Emeritus Professor David Rowe, FASSA, FAHA
Introduction: The Dialectics of Sporting Enlightenment
I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people on whose land we congregate tonight, and also those on my home Gadigal turf, pay my respect to their elders past, present and emerging, and acknowledge any First Nations people in attendance. I also support the implementation in full of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which necessarily includes voting Yes in the referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
I was very pleased that after I and the disarmingly obliging Andrew Leigh suggested to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia that they host a debate between us on sport, they enthusiastically agreed. Even more so when, a year later, it took place in the National Library (with the support of Synergy Group). I had no idea that it would become such a glittering event. I’m hoping that my reception tonight will be a little warmer than when, in 2006 as an innocent in wicked Sydney recently arrived from Newcastle, I gave the 8th Annual Tom Brock Lecture, organised by the Australian Society for Sports History, in the rather different surroundings of the New South Wales Leagues’ Club in Phillip Street.
This is but one among many examples when critiques of sporting mythologies have been at variance with personal popularity. Sporting affiliations are especially sensitive territory. For example, I pondered whether I should play the probable pantomime patsy in this place by reaffirming my support of England’s Lionesses during the recent FIFA Women’s World Cup. That revelation alone may well have lost me this debate, but as Andrew would no doubt agree, in sport, politics and life one must be bold if not, on occasion, foolhardy.
Gender Divisions
But tonight, we are all meant to be social scientists first and sport fans second. I am, in general terms, an aficionado of some sports, teams and people, and a one-time player of middling ability in some so-called gender-appropriate sports. Growing up as an at-birth nominated male in the second half of the last century, it was ill advised to be anything else but sport smart. Then, being half-way competent in and knowledgeable about contact sports in particular meant that my “hegemonic masculinity”, a concept famously proposed by Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell, went relatively unchallenged.
This early lesson in life ensured an appreciation that sport has traditionally divided us in one key respect – gender. As a social and cultural institution, sport was founded on and sustained by gender inequality, with ramifications far beyond that arena. Sport was an anointed space where men could assert superiority over women. It naturalised their claim to physiological advantage and entitlement to homosocial congregation. Apart from a few individual, predominantly middle-class, non-contact sports like tennis and golf, women found little room for professional advancement in sport. Even in such instances, the men’s version was generally deemed to be more exciting and of higher quality, and so more watchable and saleable. For example, why is the men’s final always the climax of Grand Slam tennis tournaments, and why have the riches of Saudi-backed LIV Golf not yet been extended to women?
Surely, though, there are signs of substantial progress towards gender inequality in 21st century sport, especially as we bask in the afterglow of an astonishingly successful FIFA Women’s World Cup, hosted by Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand? Yet, Forbes’ 2023 list of the world’s highest paid athletes contains only one woman, Serena Williams, at number 49. Having recently retired it seems unlikely that she will return to the list, although the also-retired Roger Federer remains there at number 9.
And, as for the Women’s World Cup, a stark reminder of sport’s unequal gender order came when Spain’s superb (though personally heart-breaking) victory over the Lionesses was immediately overshadowed by the Spanish Football President, Luis Rubiales, grabbing his crotch in celebration and then forcibly kissing the lips of a player, Jenni Hermoso, he was supposed to be respectfully congratulating.
Divide and Unite
This lamentable case brings me back to the central debate question - does sport unite or divide us? Of course, the ‘or’ could be replaced with ‘and’, meaning that the answer must be ‘yes’. Alternatively, in Social Sciences speak, I could return to the classic dialectical frame – thesis, antithesis, synthesis. In either case, sport both unites and divides in myriad ways. It is important, first, to acknowledge that it is a specific form of institutionalised physical culture that is not an endless re-run of an imaginary Ancient Olympics, but a product of modernity. What we routinely call sport only emerged in the nineteenth century, when folk games became regular, regulated physical contests with rules and even laws. As Allen Guttmann influentially put it, this signalled a move “from ritual to record” and, for Jean-Marie Brohm, constructed “a prison of measured time”.
Sport also became a compulsory part of the school curriculum and an important aspect of leisure, with the noble values of amateurism emphasising fair, honourable play. The ruthless pursuit of winning and, even worse, getting paid to play, created a deep divide within sporting culture. This split, for example, led to the secession of rugby league from rugby union, which after a period of ‘shamateurism’ became fully professional itself. Today, with the development of what I call a vast “media sports cultural complex” in which staggering sums change hands and illiberal nations burnish their reputations by refining their ‘sportswashing’ techniques, the term ‘amateur’ is commonly used as an insult.
Sport is a sprawling enterprise that encompasses everything that manifests in spaces from classrooms to boardrooms, parklands to cathedral stadia. It is increasingly difficult to think of all this as a singular phenomenon, although advocates of sport are prone to exaggerate its universality and to downplay its deficiencies. This is because sport and physical activity are often misleadingly combined, as Andrew does in his book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy. The problem with the experiential and statistical merging of sport and almost any kind of movement is that a morning jog, stroll or swim can be counted as sport, but that classification evacuates its structured competitive element, not to mention the remuneration of a minority.
When my colleagues and I at Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society surveyed a representative sample of adults as part of our Australian Research Council Australian Cultural Fields project, we found that 61.2 per cent played no organised sport at all and only 44.5 per cent had watched sport live at a venue in the past 12 months. On the other hand, 84.9 per cent had watched some sport live through the media (mostly television). So, if sport does in some sense unite us as an activity, it mainly involves watching it on screen. We found, like other researchers, that sport participation also varies by gender, class, level of education, cultural background, location, and age.
Who are ‘We’ and ‘Us’?
Such variable patterns of ‘sportingness’ raise the thorny issue of who constitutes ‘us’ and ‘we’. Andrew is quite confident about these categories, but after conducting another ARC research project, A Nation of ‘Good Sports?’, in Greater Western Sydney, I am rather less so. I found that sport can be quite isolating in culturally diverse, demographically dynamic contexts while, in contrast, it may also work as a conversational lubricant in helping to forge connections in the workplace between people of different origins. Sport can present barriers to, for example, people with backgrounds that make them feel isolated in alco-centric sport clubs, while also presenting tantalising opportunities for gender norm resistance by girls from cultures that may disapprove of female athleticism.
The point is that ‘we’ tend to think of other people as being uncannily like ‘us’ in multiple areas of life, including our experience of and orientation to sport. In my time as a Social Sciences researcher and scholar in this area I have encountered people with wildly varying attitudes to sport. In academe I found considerable snobbery regarding sport, often being told in imperious terms that it was all about ‘bread and circuses’, cheap populism, and musclebound blockheads. One esteemed member of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia told me, only half-jokingly, that ‘the Sociology of Sport should be banned’!
For others, their romantic attachment to sport as somehow transcending the mundane struggles of everyday life meant that critical analytical inquiry was only practised by professional killjoys without souls. A leading sports journalist called us ‘gibbering academics’, while sports historians of hagiographical bent discounted us as neo-Marxist malcontents.
So, in the academic and media worlds, sport is a house divided against itself. Such differences register throughout society, and not just regarding attitudes to sport but in the ways that it can be used. In community contexts and during what Dayan and Katz in their book Media Events call “high holidays of mass communication” like the Summer Olympics and the FIFA World Cup, sport has a potent unifying function at local and national levels. When mega-events are in play, even those who do not care much for sport get drawn into the spectacle because national media paper our cultural walls with it.
Mind Your Sporting Language
But, at such times it is necessary to attend to the language of sport, in media commentary, spectator talk and exchange between combatants. Too often what is heard is less than edifying. Whole nations are stereotyped as robotic or volatile; Indigenous peoples represented as both mystically talented and feckless, and people of colour animalistic and lacking in qualities of leadership; women are declared to be inferior to men, and men disparaged as feminine or stigmatised as homosexual; trans gender and non-binary athletes are called cheats and freaks; real or imputed disability is rendered as insult, and so on.
I am not, of course, claiming that most sport discourse is always so damaging and negative. There is considerable mutual respect and kindness in sport, and progress within sport organisations and among sportspeople in ruling such hurtful language out of order. To pick one example more-or-less at random, it is now eight years since Australian Capital Territory Senator David Pocock called out homophobic abuse on the field of play. Nor am I arguing that such attitudes are exclusive to or even over-represented in sport. My argument is that sport is an especially effective vehicle for hostile language and, on occasion, violent behaviour, precisely because it is structured around competition and conflict.
Andrew Leigh is quite right to say that sport at its best is beautiful to behold. But how often is it so? Sport at its most professional and esteemed has developed too much in ways that prize profit over persistence, forging a Faustian pact with gambling and performance-enhancing, body-jeopardising substances, and is overly accommodating of the compulsively corrupt and the morally bankrupt. But I don’t want to end on a depressing, downbeat note. Sport today may be on balance more divisive than unifying, but we need not abandon hope every time we enter a stadium or pass through a sport media portal.
Social Goals and Penalties
To return to our Australian Cultural Fields research, a striking finding was that women typically aged 35 and above, in lower management/professional/intermediate occupations, who had completed an undergraduate and often a postgraduate degree in the Humanities and Social Sciences outside the elite Group of Eight universities, constituted the cultural taste cluster most indifferent and hostile to sport. Based on stadium/live site attendance and media statistics and my very unscientific sample of conversations with such women during and after the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup, sport in Australia may have taken a sudden, unifying turn. More than once I heard that, if only more elite sport were like this, then it would soon find a loyal new band of previously alienated adherents.
The final lesson, then, is that sport can unite rather than divide us. All it needs to do is reinvent its structures and practices, rediscover its ethical mission, and reimagine who are ‘us’. A societal success preferably achieved without the accompanying heart palpitations induced by a penalty shootout.
For the full broadcast of the debate recorded by ABC Radio listen here.
References
Balague, G. (2023) Luis Rubiales Kissing Jenni Hermoso Unleashes Social Tsunami in Spain, BBC News, 27 August, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66626866
Bennett, T. Carter, D. Gayo, M. Kelly, M. and Noble, G. (eds), Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions. London and New York: Routledge.
Brohm, J-M. (1978) Sport: A Prison of Measured Time. London: Pluto.
Carp, S. and Dixon, E. (2023) Attendance Milestones, Viewership Records and a Social Media Bonanza: The 2023 Women’s World Cup in Numbers, SportsPro Media, 24 August, https://www.sportspromedia.com/insights/analysis/womens-world-cup-2023-attendance-figures-viewership-social-media/
Cohen, A. (2023) LPGA’s Rose Zhang Mulls Potential Saudi Investment in Women’s Golf, Front Office Sports, 18 August, https://frontofficesports.com/lpgas-rose-zhang-mulls-potential-saudi-investment-in-womens-golf/
Connell, R. (2005) Masculinities (second edition). Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cooky, C. and Messner, M.A. (eds) (2018) No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Dayan, D. and Katz, E. (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press.
Dutton, C. (2015) David Pocock Says No Room for Homophobic Slurs in Sport or Society After Incident in Brumbies Clash Against Waratahs, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March, https://www.smh.com.au/sport/rugby-union/david-pocock-says-no-room-for-homophobic-slurs-in-sport-or-society-after-incident-in-brumbies-clash-against-waratahs-20150322-1m4vsf.html
FIFA (2023) Women’s World Cup 2023, https://www.fifa.com/fifaplus/en/tournaments/womens/womensworldcup/australia-new-zealand2023?intcmp=(p_fifaplus)_(d_)_(c_webheader-fwwc2023)_(sc_logo)_(ssc_)_(da_07072023)_(l_en)
Gayo, M. and Rowe, D. (2018) The Australian Sport Field: Moving and Watching, Media International Australia, 167(1):162-80.
Guttmann, A. (1978) From Ritual to Record: The Nature of Modern Sports. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kassam, A. and Lowe, S. (2023) Jenni Hermoso Files Criminal Complaint Against Luis Rubiales Over Kiss’, The Guardian, 7 September, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/06/jenni-hermoso-files-criminal-complaint-against-luis-rubiales-over-kiss
Kilvington, D. and Price, J. (eds) (2018) Sport and Discrimination. London: Routledge.
Knight, B. (2023) Why Only One Woman Made The Ranks Of The World’s 50 Highest-Paid Athletes, Forbes, 16 May,
Leigh, A. (2022) Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society & a Stronger Economy. Melbourne: Monash University Press.
Rowe, D. (2004) Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity (second edition) (first edition, 1999). Maidenhead, UK and New York: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education. Arabic translation, Cairo: The Nile Group (2006); Chinese translation, Beijing: McGraw Hill and Tsinghua University Press (2013).
Rowe, D. (2007) The Stuff of Dreams, or the Dream Stuffed? Rugby League, Media Empires, Sex Scandals, and Global Plays, 8th Tom Brock Annual Lecture. Sydney: Australian Society for Sports History, 24pp. Re-published in The First Ten Years of the Tom Brock Lecture. Sydney: Tom Brock Bequest Committee (2010). http://www.tombrock.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Tom-Brock-No8.pdf
Rowe, D. (2017) We’re All Transnational Now: Sport in Dynamic Socio-Cultural Environments’, Sport in Society, 20(10): 1470-84. Also published in S. Naha (ed) (2018) Global and Transnational Sport: Ambiguous Borders, Connected Domains. London and New York, Routledge.
Symons, K. and Bowell, P. (2023) ‘Felt Alienated by the Men’s Game’: How the Culture of Women’s Sport has Driven Record Matildas Viewership, The Conversation, 17 August, https://theconversation.com/felt-alienated-by-the-mens-game-how-the-culture-of-womens-sport-has-driven-record-matildas-viewership-211524
Wenner. L. A. (ed) Oxford Handbook of Sport and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Western Sydney University (2023a) Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics. Parramatta: Institute for Culture and Society. https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ACF
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A 2022 discussion of the question ‘Does Sport Unite or Divide Us?’ hosted by Ginger Gorman, with contributions by David Rowe and Nicole Hayes, author and host of The Outer Sanctum podcast.
Revised and Reduced Version of David Rowe’s Talk
Presentation II
Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society and a Stronger Economy: Read Andrew Leigh’s edited talk here (opens in a new window)
This article is a revised and reduced version of an address by Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury and the Assistant Minister for Employment. It was delivered at the inaugural Social Sciences Week Great Debate held at the National Library of Australia on the 5th of September 2023 to answer the question “Does Sport Unite or Divide Us?”
I acknowledge the Ngunnawal people, recognise any First Nations people present, and commit myself to the implementation in full of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, starting by voting yes on October 14.
Thanks to the Academy of Social Sciences and David Rowe for being such good sports as to put this on. Special thanks to David for attending. We began this conversation on his home turf when I launched my book Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society and a Stronger Economy at UTS last year, and it’s fitting that he’s now playing an away game in Canberra. There’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, and there’s no ‘I’ in David Rowe. Well, not more than one, anyway. I’m sure he’ll give it 110 percent today, and that sport will be the winner at the end of the day.
At its best, sport embodies both achievement and egalitarianism. We admire athletes who perform new feats of strength, speed and dexterity. We prize the idea that what matters isn’t their bank balances or their connections but their hard work. In team sports, we want to see a tournament in which the last-placed team of one season starts the following year with a fighting chance of winning.
This dual nature of sport has also provided memorable markers on Australia’s reconciliation journey: the Indigenous cricket team that toured England in 1868; the success of Cathy Freeman in the 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics; Johnathan Thurston captaining the North Queensland Cowboys to their first National Rugby League (NRL) premiership in 2015; Ash Barty becoming tennis’s world number one in 2019. Many white Australians who grew up in rural areas say that their first friendships with Indigenous people were forged on the playing field.
National and Personal Pride
Sport is a source of national and personal pride. Watch an international sporting competition and there’s a reasonable chance an Aussie will be in contention. But sport isn’t purely an elite activity. For millions of Australians, participating in sport is integral to a good life. Whether it’s a hit of tennis, a gym workout or a dance session, exercise is part of a life well lived.
As the father of three sons, my favourite moments with them are when we’re physically active: cycling down a mountain, bodysurfing a wave, or walking the dog. My wife Gweneth and I both notice that, after they’ve done some exercise, our boys are nicer people to be around: funnier, kinder, less inclined to squabble. That’s true of their parents too.
Like many Australians, I’m a sporting tragic. In my case, I trace the passion back to my grandfather, Keith Leigh, a Melbourne Methodist church minister who loved distance running. To celebrate his fiftieth birthday, Keith ran from his home in Rosanna in Melbourne’s north-east, all the way to Mount Dandenong to see his mother at a retirement home there, then back again.
The all-day run covered 80 kilometres (50 miles). My father Michael Leigh was also a marathon runner who grew up watching Ron Clarke, Herb Elliott and John Landy. My favourite photograph of my father and grandfather has them both lacing up their running shoes, big goofy grins on their faces.
In my own case, I love starting the day with a run in the bush, smelling the eucalypts and listening to the kookaburras. I get pleasure from sweating hard, and joy from training with people who are quicker than me. This Sunday, I’m running the Canberra 100 ultramarathon, and if you’re keen to join me, entries are still open.
Life Lessons
While sport isn’t life, it provides crucial life lessons. Training lays the groundwork for success. Stress is no excuse for bad behaviour. Respect your opponents. Everyone makes mistakes—it’s how you react that counts. Luck matters. Teams are greater than the sum of their parts. Win with dignity. Lose with integrity.
In sport, equal treatment is fundamental. Teams playing at an outdoor venue swap ends at half-time so that neither side gets the benefit of a tailwind. Martial arts fighters are matched by weight to ensure a fair fight. Amateur golf events and many professional horse races use a handicap system. In team sports, player drafts, salary caps and revenue-sharing are imposed to ensure that no team monopolises a tournament.
Sport isn’t utopia, but for all its flaws, it has much to teach us about creating a fairer society and a stronger economy. When he was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame, Australia’s greatest cricketer, Don Bradman, summed up his views on the relationship between success and decency:
When considering the stature of an athlete—or for that matter any person—I set great store on certain qualities which I believe to be essential in addition to skill. They are that the person conducts his or her life with dignity, with integrity, with courage, and perhaps most of all with modesty. These virtues are totally compatible with pride, ambition and competitiveness.
Sport teaches us that we don’t have to sacrifice egalitarianism and honour in pursuit of victory.
Fair Game: Lessons from Sport for a Fairer Society and a Stronger Economy is published by the Monash University Press.
Text originally published on Open Forum (opens in a new window)
