Introduction to “Sport and Failure”

How to account for the range of ways we lose—from stunning to unremarkable, nail-biting to dull, gut-wrenching to pleasing, nonaffirming to satisfying, disqualified to withdrawn, devastating to enriching, falling just short of victory’s grasp to needing the mercy rule to stop further humiliation? What can we learn from the “losers,” the athletes whose feats are forgotten, surpassed, or not deemed worthy of inclusion in the official record books? A focus on losing and losers in sports helps us understand how failure operates culturally, marking the boundaries as well as the transgressive possibilities of athletic competition to shape social experiences, structures, and institutions.

In her photo series Fourth, Australian aboriginal artist Tracey Moffat depicts the “antiglamour” of coming in fourth place at the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, invoking the violent history of indigenous erasure by White colonizers in Australia. As Jack Halberstam (2011) observes,

these images remind us that winning is a multivalent event: in order for someone to win, someone else must fail to win, and so this act of losing has its own logic, its own complexity, its own aesthetic, but ultimately, also, its own beauty. (p. 93)

The textured experience, representation, and analysis of losing can help us feel our way through the layers of failure’s discursive possibilities and the magnitude of “sport’s power (both as spectacle and in terms of its ludic appeal) as a form of competitive human movement, embodied practice and emotional release” (Carrington, 2010, p. 48). An attention to losing and its attendant effects and affects reframes and broadens our understanding of sports’ various antagonisms: individual versus individual, team versus team, nation versus nation. As real and imagined communities, sporting worlds are popular terrain for competing ideologies about individual and communal identities. Instead of focusing on winners and statistics of success, here we unpack the sporting and cultural drama of failure.

This Special Issue, devoted to the study of sport and failure, is an interdisciplinary endeavor that examines athletics as a contested cultural realm where nationalized, racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed bodies, structures, and ideas are constructed, circulated, challenged, contradicted, consumed, and continued on and off the playing field (King & Leonard, 2006, p. 228). The three essays here illuminate, amplify, and test how failure in sports can directly challenge a world obsessed with winning, power, prestige, and privilege. A critical framework that interrogates these articulations of success provides the necessary critical practices and processes for understanding the physical and cultural contests that play out in sports and popular culture. “Sport as a topic,” as Gary Whannel (2008) suggests, “is markedly well structured in terms of offering a metaphor for lived experience under capitalism, providing the terrain on which the ideological elements of competitive individualism can be worked through” (p. 98). Inspired by C. L. R. James’s (1963) seminal work on sports as culture, history, philosophy, social theory, and dramatic visual art, this collection of contemporary sports scholars continues to push us “beyond a boundary” of sports as sacred, depoliticized spaces and rituals. As “contested terrains” (Denning, 1990), a focus on sports in popular culture renders clear the idea that sport is not a meritocratic institution that rewards “fair play” (p. 4). A multibillion-dollar industry, athletics, particularly in the United States, produces a kind of cultural hegemony, conveying norms and values about the ethics of identification, competition, and consumption via the marketing and circulation of brands, icons, and celebrities that tout the power and promise of success in sports for those willing to shed blood, sweat, and tears in pursuit of being number one (Lowe, 2016, p. 250).

Although winning is multivalent, U.S. sports culture presents it as telos and monologic, with losing as a nonoption or that which is disavowed or erased by the triumphant winner. The legendary football coach Vince Lombardi popularized Henry Sanders’ now cliched and oft-quoted phrase: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” Lombardi articulates the totality of winning in sports as its operating logic; this primacy overemphasizes winning and hierarchizes victory as the ultimate and only worthwhile experience. Lombardi and Sanders’ hyperbolic and paradoxical take on winning, as Steven J. Overman (1999) signals, “has served as counterpoint to the well-known sentiment by American sports journalist Grantland Rice that, ‘[it’s] not that you won or lost but how you played the game’” (p. 77).

In U.S. sports, winning as the sole end goal is championed on and off the playing field. This notion reifies a competitive, capitalist logic that one should win at all cost. In this sense, “the importance of winning has been touted as a basic tenet of the American sports creed and, at the same time, singled out as encapsulating what is wrong with competitive sport” (Overman, 1999, p. 77). Triumph on the playing field affords a small minority of athletes’ financial rewards and social currency. However, the need to maintain a competitive edge and come out on top can drive professional athletes to extreme ends and cost them the sports they love. For example, the controversy and fallout over disgraced athletes like cyclist Lance Armstrong, who used and lied about taking illegal performance-enhancing drugs, and figure skater Tonya Harding, who was implicated in a violent attack on fellow competitor Nancy Kerrigan, reveal the cruelty of competition in a society that idealizes winning and mythologizes athletic prowess. Both athletes’ actions are understood as personal failures, moral deficiencies divorced from sporting and social politics on winning to reify the “goodness” of both systems, which rewards winners and punishes deviance. Their breaking of the rules and bones, respectively, may be socially stigmatized but their goal-oriented actions are culturally condoned. Apropos of these paradoxes, on a different sporting matter, The New York Times question—“why do fans excuse the Patriots’ cheating past?”—can provide more clarity on the condemnation of Armstrong and Harding (Macur, 2017). The answer is clear: winning, money, power, and prestige drown sporting individuals, but they also buoy sporting institutions driven by profit margins and not ethics. Athletes like Armstrong and Harding (however embattled and problematic) have not gone against the code that “winning is the only thing” but revealed the illicit labor of such ventures, the hidden costs of bodies measured by “capitalists formulations of success and from economic notions of gain, profit, advantage and benefit” (Carrington, 2010, p. 130). Their personal failures, punishments, and exercises in redemption evince the systematic ways ideological tensions are managed in sport’s global market economies.

Armstrong, Harding, and a host of other athletes’ failures—on and off the field—also have other effects. Their failures demystify the aura of athletics as a realm of meritocracy that rewards the most superior and dedicated, the ones willing to put their bodies on the line in grueling bouts of athletic contests. Their and others f(l)ailing gladiatorial actions emphasize how sporting worlds are filled with violent compromising and debilitating choices. These exemplary and cautionary figures are not the only ones subjected to the assaults of underachievement. Athletes at various amateur and professional levels find themselves under extreme pressure. The physical and psychic stresses attached to winning manifest in various ways. The need to win anthropophagizes, somatizes, and materializes stress; it “eats away” at athletes in the form of anorexia, bulimia, ulcers, repetitive strain injury, depression, amenorrhea, ligament tears, and other ailments. Their bodies and minds are punished in the pursuit of reward, an abuse deemed not only justifiable but praiseworthy if they do in fact succeed. As Toby Miller suggests, the body is implicated in this dialectic between monetary success and subjection. “Bodily discourses of exertion, force, rules, and competition,” Miller (2001) observes, “provoke struggles between dominant and subordinate groups for symbolic and material rewards. Of course, more generally social control is exercised through bodily coercion and consent, by training bodies to discipline themselves into a quasi-mechanical way of life” (p. 15). These acts of self-discipline extend outward, shaping other sporting power structures. Hegemonic modalities of violent domination code sports as a “patriarchal system [that] demands adherence to hierarchy and to the ‘pain principle,’ where leadership has the right to inflict pain on members of the group in the pursuit of victory” (Oates, 2014, p. 217).

Yet, losing is common, and there are a disproportionate number of losers than there are winners. Donald W. Ball (1976, p. 726) defines losing in sports within two dimensions of failure: performance and its consequent. He explains that “[failure] is the inability, for whatever reason, to satisfy the standards of goal-related performance, leading to the separation or estrangement of the failed from the goal-specified position from which it (the goal) has been unsuccessfully pursued” (Ball, 1976, p. 726). In sports, failure is meant to signal a lack of superior performance and is regularly featured in popular culture. With examples like ESPN SportsCenter’s “Not Top Ten,” sports media often depicts stories of failure “to ridicule or castigate or to highlight the ‘lighter side’ of sports” (Oates, 2014, p. 216). Yet still, sporting failure is quotidian activity, and athletes are conditioned to know that losing is commonplace and taught the “right” and “wrong” ways to lose. They are aware that losing shadows winning and that the impending possibility and inevitability of failure haunts the promise of success. This specter exposes the temporality of participation and success in sporting practices. Even the best athletes know that someone is always trying to and eventually will take their place at the top. As well, for most athletes, losing is perhaps the most consistent and fundamental aspect of playing sports. Unless you are the champion, you play until you lose. Defeat, while unwelcome, can be pedagogically disruptive, teaching players and spectators, sports scholars, and readers about the devastation of loss in a culture obsessed with measures of success down to the smallest fraction. Defeat reminds us that not everyone operates on a level playing field, not due to meritocracy but a product of “societies structured in dominance” (Hall, 1980).

The authors herein argue that failure dialectically counterposes winning, drawing explicitly from queer theory’s critical insistence on imagining and recognizing existing alternatives to normative ideas of value and triumph. The authors are indebted to the critical theorizing of Jose Muñoz and Jack Halberstam. Muñoz’s (2009) provocative exploration of performances of failure and virtuosity constructs queer utopia as political refusal of social norms and pragmatism (p. 176). Halberstam (2011), following Muñoz, expands on this counterdiscourse of resistance in The Queer Art of Failure, which “dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live” (p. 2). Drawing on an “undisciplined” archive of popular culture artifacts, Halberstam (2011) proposes that failure, loss, and unbecoming can produce “alternative ways of knowing and being that are not unduly optimist, but nor are they mired in nihilistic critical dead ends” (p. 24).

Failure, in this capacity, can be read as resistance, a way to critique the market logic of success that rewards winners and punishes losers. This discourse of losing is purposefully counterintuitive. By going against what Antonio Gramsci describes as the “common-sense” production of norms about winning and capital accumulation, Halberstam suggests that low theory and counterknowledge cultivate a counterhegemonic common sense attuned to alternative ways of existing and resisting. A rejection of heteronormative common sense, queer failure articulates an oppositional practice and pedagogy of underachievement, a failure to adhere to the logics of power and discipline that “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 88). By falling short, by unabashedly losing, failure has the possibility to function as critique that “can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminant qualities” (Halberstam, 2011, p. 88). Queer failure, in this sense, is imbricated with nonconformist and anticapitalist practices that expose the rigging of systemic, economic success.

With so much at stake in winning, losing has the possibility to challenge dominant definitions and enactments of success, control, discipline, and force in sports, an already unpredictable arena where expected victors can be surprisingly usurped by underdogs and “Cinderella” stories. Although they grapple with different sports and athletes, this cohort of authors, ranging in fields of study, methodologies, and objects of study demonstrate here how failure articulates forms and practices of resistance to the ideological underpinnings of sports cultures and discourses of performance, consumption, and identification. Failure is disruptive of dominant ideologies that create a “vertical order of being” (Sadiya Hartmann quoted in Okpokwasili, 2014) on and off the field: capitalism, consumerism, nationalism, ableism, White supremacy, heteronormativity, and the gender binary. Losing is counterdiscourse, producing strategic alternatives to being, nonbeing, and becoming in the world. The authors herein insist upon examining losing, failing, and defeat as disruptive strategies in dominant sporting cultures. Failure, in this regard, provides the opportunity to play against or refuse the rules that govern, discipline, and punish participants in sports and society.

As a mode of critique, sporting failure suggests that the pursuit of victory is not always an intention of those participating; refusal of mastery can diffuse the disciplinary powers of governmentality, militarization, and capitalism. Take, for example, the ways in which indigenous athletes counter the Western sports logics of success, domination, and social progress. In Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics, Jules Boykoff (2016) explains the challenges Western organizers faced when trying to get indigenous athletes to conform to settler rules of athleticism and competition:

But cultural differences wrecked the master plan. Instead of plunging through the finish-line ribbon, indigenous runners would wait for their colleagues or duck under the tape. As Parezo notes, “Cooperation was more important than ‘victory’ . . . waiting for friends was a sign of graciousness and a symbol of respect in many cultures.” (p. 34)

Failure here is anticolonial disavowal, a refusal to “play the game” as intended, an oppositional technique of running, play, participation, and (under)achievement.

The essays in this Special Issue examine the amplification of winning and losing within the heightened stakes of cultures of competition. bell hooks’s (1996) reading of the basketball film Hoop Dreams (Steve James, 1994) as a “neo-colonial fantasy of conquest” (p. 77) underscores how sporting competition fuels racial division, White supremacy, and capitalism. Drawing on Mab Segrest’s Memoir of a Race Traitor (1994), hooks (1996) explains that “the ethic of competition undergirds the structure of racism and sexism in the United States, that to be ‘American’ is to be seduced by the lure of domination, by conquest, by winning” (p. 82). hooks relates this sentiment of seduction to the documentary Hoop Dream’s cinematic formal choices—its editing of a diegetic rivalry between the two young Black male protagonists, Arthur Agee and William Gates, who dream of becoming professional basketball players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Despite the protagonists’ camaraderie throughout Hoop Dreams, hooks (1996) details that “by constant comparing and contrasting their fate, the film creates a symbolic competition” (p. 81), where Agee is celebrated for his unrelenting obsession with basketball and Gates is marginalized for his critique of competition. hooks’s analysis signals how Hoop Dreams’ dramatizes the broader identity formations produced under American capitalism for men and women beyond the realm of sport. As Segrest explains (quoted in hooks, 1996),

As a child of Europeans, a woman whose families have spent many generations on these shores, some of them in relative material privilege, my culture raised me to compete for grades, for jobs, for money, for self-esteem. As my lungs breathes in competition, they breathed out the stale air of individualism, delivering the toxic message; You are on your own. (p. 82)

To be anything other is to fall short of that goal, to lose, and, thus, fail at being and belonging.

Both hooks and Segrest describe what Lisa Lowe (2016) calls the “violence of inclusion” (p. 251) in sports and U.S. culture. As Lowe explains, Asian American identities in sports index the violence produced by the expansion of racial capitalism in global “cultures of bruising” (Early, 1994, p. 14), a prizefighting term that can be extended to describe all kinds of combative and competitive sports. With the globalization of capitalism, she contends that “sport is the theater for the formation of national insiders and outsiders, heroes and villains” (Lowe, 2016, p. 251). Lowe’s insight on how sports imbricate racial, gendered, sexualized, classed, and nationalized antagonisms extend beyond Asian American sporting cultures. Take, for example, the heroic actions of Black sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, whose Black Power salute during the medal ceremony was an act of resistance. “In their attempt to speak out against racial oppression,” historian Amy Bass (2002) explains, “Smith and Carlos employed a cultural strategy that contested the dominant tradition of American nationalism” (p. 25). They aligned their victory with socially, politically, and economically disenfranchised real and imagined communities. Smith’s and Carlos’s “protest took place within the dominant ritual, acknowledged its accompanying symbols, and then proceeded to revolutionize it, subverting the normative presentation of the nation-state with its own tools” (Bass, 2002, p. 241). Although these winners became revolutionaries, they were also treated like “losers” after the Games, punished, attacked, and denied opportunities. Their example, however, reveals the nuanced analysis needed to understand the logics of winning and losing. Coming in first and third place, respectively, Smith’s and Carlos’s silent gestures emphatically suggest that sometimes Black people must win to critique the political failures of citizenship in national contexts and on global stages.

The three essays in this issue posit distinct and yet interrelated claims about sports, failure, and identity. The contributors recognize that possible alternatives identity formations are embedded in narratives of failure while challenging the idea of who can fail, paying attention to how race and racial formations specifically shape the politics of failure. Their intersectional analyses reveal the ideological power and cultural appeal of what David J. Leonard (2017) identifies as “playing while white.” Whiteness affords multiple opportunities to fail (up) and be deviant because “sports culture narrates a sports world defined by exceptional whiteness, victimized whiteness, transgressive whiteness, marginal whiteness, and redemptive whiteness” (Leonard, 2017, p. 8).

In this Special Issue, Carly Gieseler’s essay “Learning to Fail: Adolescent Resistance in Extreme Sports” focuses on one aspect of “playing while white.” She meditates on how extreme athletes resist, reject, and re-embody adult White masculinity through their youthful, less masterful performances as stuntman, tricksters, and daredevils. Gieseler argues that extreme sports participants negotiate the liminal space between normative, mainstream sporting success and the anarchic productions, haphazard chaos, and unruly mayhem of their high-risk activities. By tracing the origins of extreme sporting culture through the legend of Evil Knievel and the collectives of the Dangerous Sports Club and the Nitro Circus, she argues that failure is central to these athletes’ identities, performances, and repudiations of hegemonic masculinity. Critical of the ways non-White and nonmale identities are othered in extreme sports, Gieseler’s analysis pivots on the ways these White masculinities negotiate sporting resistance and their privileged positions through a practice at the margins of sports culture. For certain other raced, classed, gendered, sexualized, and nationalized athletes, failure underscores the ever-present physical, psychic, and economic precarity of everyday living.

Evan Brody continues thinking about sport and failure by questioning how gender, sexual identity, and racial performance shape, negotiate, and challenge discourses of sporting failure. In “With the 249th Pick...: Michael Sam and Imagining Failure Otherwise,” Brody focuses on the media spectacle surrounding the openly gay former University of Missouri football player Michael Sam. Examining his “coming-out” announcement, seventh-round National Football League (NFL) draft pick by the St. Louis Rams, and his subsequent retirement from professional football, Brody maintains that Sam, as a Black gay man in American sporting culture, is always already positioned as a failure within heteronormative and racist logics and discourses. Sam’s ultimately disappointing football career provides the occasion to rethink queer failure in terms of racialized mass media, LGBTQ communal practices, and popular culture spectacles.

My essay “Boobie Miles: Failure and Friday Night Lights” extends this line of inquiry into the mythification of meritocracy, individualism, and narratives of success. By examining Peter Berg’s 2004 film adaptation of H. G. Bissinger’s (1990) bestseller Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, A Dream, I address how the film’s narrative ending in defeat explicitly challenges the false promise of sports for Black male athletes. I read the sporting failures and racial iconicity of James “Boobie” Miles, the most well-known and tragic character in Bissinger’s and Berg’s texts, in terms of his embodied effects and affects. I argue that Boobie becomes the site of embodied defeat in the film’s repudiation of sporting blackness. It is his later reclamation in hip hop cultural texts that evinces how (Black) popular culture consumes, identifies, and reworks failure in ways that open critical possibilities and potentialities of being and becoming.

Finally, this Special Issue is indebted to Jack Halberstam’s specific writing on sport and failure (2011, 2016), which catalyzed the thematics and codified the urgency of these critical interventions. The authors use and pivot beyond his theorizing on failure in their critical and consequential engagements with losing in relationship to players, practices, cultures, and communities. In dialogue with a range of works, queries, and disciplinary fields, these sports studies scholars use a range of critical approaches to provide innovative critical entanglements for understanding how sports’ types, players, worlds, and industries create, reproduce, and resist social hierarchies. They mobilize failure as counterlogic, a discursive challenge to the idea that winning is everything and the only thing worth remembering, mentioning, or studying.