Abstract
This article re-enacts a typical experience of male sport initiation at a university in the south of England and presents a confessional account of my own shifting epistemological position and desire to create more balanced, ethical, reflexive and self-effacing research. The tale of initiation is constructed from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with male collegiate football (soccer) players and subsequent purposive conversations with male collegiate rugby players. It aims to confront the reader with the lived experience of male student sport initiations, providing a platform for unremitting reflection and greater possibilities for academic recourse. In particular, I suggest, the tale constructs a dais for sociological dialogue about the existentiality and configurations of, and relationships between, deviance, masculinities and subcultural identities in a student sport setting.
Following a brief though very discernible period of negative press coverage of university sport in the UK, the then British Universities Sports Association (BUSA) alluded to the ratification of policy banning the practice of sport initiation ceremonies across universities (Feist et al., 2004). Increasingly, initiation in the UK and in North America is being examined from a rational and political standpoint resulting in realist accounts of what Smith and Waddington (2004) refer to as the underground Dionysian/Epicurean element of athletic ideology, representing initiations as ambiguous deviant overconformity and/or manifestly or latently gendered affairs (Clayton and Harris, 2009; Johnson, 2002; Kirby and Wintrup, 2002; Waldron and Kowalski, 2009). Often associated with a culture of machismo (Bryshun, 1997) and incorporating high levels of alcohol consumption and nudity (Clayton and Harris, 2009), male sport initiations are reported to serve as a deliberate act of identity construction and confirmation (Donnelly and Young, 1988). Johnson and Holman’s (2004) inaugural collection on sport initiations provides a strong theoretical analysis focused predominantly on the interrelationship of initiation and hazing. Such accounts are invaluable, but in placing hazing central to initiation processes, they are also in danger of ignoring the ‘reality’ of the experience of initiates. My aim in this article is to problematize the essentialism inherent in these accounts and ‘report’ a narrative of male sport initiation at a university in the south of England. In doing so, I present data in the form of ‘a tale’ that aims to shed light on, rather than objectify, the experience of male team sport initiations for a small group of men.
A tale of writing a tale: ‘Isn’t this all just about masculinity?’
Scholarly conferences are, amongst other things, an arena in which the academic does battle for his own epistemological avowal. Around the table, scholars limber-up with a sip or two of rather cheap red wine, neophytes take more than just a sip, and a very well-known academic sharpens his sword. Men’s experiences of sport and, more specifically, an earlier presentation of an autoethnography of long-distance running form the topic of conversation. The speaker, all are agreed, delivered a more than adequate article, but the well-known academic takes issue with an impertinent question from the audience. ‘Isn’t this all just about masculinity?’ The audience member had asked. The battleground is very much set.
The well-known academic is incensed by the very notion that a story of one man’s experience of running could be reduced to such a familiar discourse of gender. The scholars ruminate about ‘structural’ sociology, especially pro-feminism, and its tendency to reduce everything to a pre-established set of cultural criteria. The neophytes sit quiet, simultaneously reflective and sheepish, most of them until now satisfied with their orthodoxy. It would appear that I am a neophyte, ‘born and developed under the aegis of solid modernity, [. . .] preoccupied with the conditions of human obedience and conformity’ (Bauman, 2000: 213). I raise a glass to my lips and take a gulp of courage and perspective. I am now a scholar again. I am a scholar that must acknowledge what Giulianotti (2005) makes cursory reference to as the ‘heuristic value’ of the postmodern and its rejection of meta-narratives and universal reasoning. But I am also a scholar so entrenched in the guiding principles of neo-Marxism and pro-feminism and particularly the work of Connell (1987, 2005) that any story I have told of athletic culture and sporting experience is inevitably representative of their teachings. I am a scholar that leaves the conference in a very messy place, epistemologically.
The problem – if one can call it that – is less about perspectivistic preferences and is, rather, the partiality of inferences, driven by theory at the expense of alternative readings. This problem is two-fold. First, it is the tight and straightforward ‘framing’ of inference locked into a single position of dominance. There is a need, then, to problematize theory frameworks and cautiously and imaginatively deploy ‘ways of thinking’, perhaps, for example, by acknowledging the level of abstraction required of ‘liquid modern’ (Bauman, 2000) analyses within or contrasting with the political-utilizable lens of modernity, effectively creating an adumbrated, entiticized conceptual skeleton. In social constructionism this is more easily achieved through the critical reflexivity and open-endedness that come to define the perspective. Second, the problem is one of representation and, more specifically, the uncertainty about what constitutes adequate representation. How does one ‘write the social’ (Richardson, 1990: 12)? Certainly, if the researcher adopts an adumbrated and inclusive, interpretive conceptual lens, then it would be problematic, even impossible, to edit themselves out of the final text. That same lens that seeks to understand the complexity and individuality of human existence within or amongst the sui generis elements of a specific research group (see Giulianotti, 2005: 212), also requires a mode of representation that captures this complexity as a lived experience. This particular prong of the problem is one of establishing a direct link between experience and text (Denzin and Lincoln, 2003).
I am the neophyte and my stories are about masculinity. They represent the social facts painstakingly gathered by way of traditional qualitative method. I am now also the critic and I infer that my stories are about masculinity. They represent social inferences produced by way of traditional qualitative method and reproduced by way of a written text. I am in unfamiliar epistemological terrain. I do not disagree with ‘the facts’ that inform my stories – the men in these stories play sport, they consume a lot of alcohol and like to talk about, dance with and get close to women, but in most cases deny any intimacy. But I now ‘confess’ to playing up or playing down certain facts, to producing fragmented, decontextualized and debased accounts – accounts that may be unrecognizable to the actors portrayed within them. Like Rowe (2003: 120) I am beginning to see it as a ‘misconception [that] academic text [is] somehow less manufactured, more “real” that its literary equivalent’. Accounts of history or culture, whether predominantly informed by logico-scientific or narrative mode (see Bruner, 1986; Richardson, 1990) can assemble the same facts to tell very different stories. In a sense, ‘truth’ is ‘storied’ (Polman, 2005).
I want to become ‘re-embodied’ in the events that informed my realist tales. I want my tales to be more than a mere connection between my own perceptual apparatus and the conceptual problems I know of. In short, I want to render the lived experience, create the world and play on the readers’ senses (see Richardson and Lockridge, 1991). As a consequence, I have constructed an ethnographic fiction, built with the blocks of ‘being there’ (Sparkes, 2002) as a listener to certain people and a witness to certain events, but inscribed with a fictive text that attempts to communicate a typical experience of male sport initiation. The tale is a rendering of 14 post-event accounts, including formal interviews with eight male collegiate soccer players as part of a wider and sustained ethnographic study of the culture of men’s soccer at university (Clayton and Humberstone, 2006). This is supported with subsequent purposive conversations with six collegiate rugby players and non-participant, interpretative observations of their respective initiation rituals. The expressed experiences of all these men are condensed into a single experience of the tale’s primary character, Gary, while further characters are based on participants in the wider ethnography of male collegiate soccer players. The tale then is an assimilation of two different and well-established initiation rituals, the experiences of those men that endured them, and some of the ‘spectacles’ (Bauman, 2000) that come to define the community of male collegiate athletes. It is an exchange of prose between ‘real’ data (in the form of written observations, fragments of natural occurring talk, responses taken from interview dialogue explicitly relayed or paraphrased and woven into the tale as words from the mouths of the actors) and the fictionalized text, which attempts to reduce, reorganize and visceralize the data as a lived experience. My own experience as a former ‘soccer’ initiate, many years earlier, also comes to inform this tale largely by way of an empathy or appreciation, which allowed me to ‘know’ more and ‘show’ a richer, more involved description. Like Richardson (1994), I see the written account not simply as a way of ‘telling’ but also ‘knowing’ (and ‘showing’) a reality for an active, rather than passive, readership (Sparkes, 2002). It is the reader that may sanitize the text and place their own meaning on its verses, while the author merely provides the analytical options through the evocativeness of their prose. The prose may ‘resonate with the cultural’ (Jones, 2006), allowing others to embody the sense of a lived experience and in turn increase critical, sociological empathy for any number of phenomena that may be isolated in the tale. There is of course an implicit ‘theme’ (Denison and Markula, 2003) or a ‘theoretical signpost[ing]’ (Jones, 2006) that is central to my writing of the tale and may help the reader better interpret my tale or at least reveal my own situatedness for the purposes of critique. To this end, in this tale at least, I see as problematic the foundationalist stance of critical theory and prefer the dialogue and the ‘communicative and pragmatic’ concept of validity to be found in social constructionism (Lincoln and Guba, 2003: 273). In particular, I favour constructionism in the postmodern turn that might broaden the discussion about men, sport and associated behaviours and submit this for unremitting reflection by the well-known academic, the scholars and the neophytes. I do not, however, take a nihilistic stance and, rather, do assume that knowledge and experience is in part ideological and tinged though perhaps not saturated with values. In other words, I do not reject the criticalist perspective and indeed cannot in earnest reject it since it has informed much of my pro-feminist writing to date and still permeates my lens.
The broad structure of the tale is guided by chronology and is presented as chronological fragments, which encapsulate some of the recalled events and the feelings of the men over the course of the initiation evening. In essence, it is made up of imported ‘themed’ speech and actions from the social domains that informed the original research, tied together by a common (witnessed, experienced and read) vernacular of male collegiate communities. As such, the tale may convey a heteronormative ‘tone’, which may appear at odds with my announced pro-feminist beliefs, but is faithful to the masculinist discourses of this and other male athletic cultures (see Clayton and Humberstone, 2006; Curry, 1991; Schacht, 1996). The tale begins midway through the evening of the initiation ritual.
10.13 pm: Trepidation
‘What am I doing here?’ Gary thinks, tilting his head back allowing the vodka to trickle down his throat warming him to his stomach. He shivers. ‘Jesus!’
He exhales purposefully in a futile attempt to calm himself. His hands tremble quite violently. The clamour of the Union is but an eerie and muffled backdrop to his own resounding thoughts. The lives of others around him progress as normal, unknowing, uncaring and barefaced. There is a fat girl blithering on about something just to his left, arms aloft and thrashing, theatrically re-enacting some clearly essential and no-doubt outrageous morsel of shite. Her gal-pals are just as voracious in their reaction, laughing wide-mouthed and throwing their heads this way and that, momentarily discontinuing just long enough to sup some luminous drink through their ridiculous curly straws. They sit on high stalls around a high circular table, legs crossed and dangling freely from the knees. One of them has a small black bag suspended from her shoulder by a long strap. Her deep purple dress ends just above the knee and the lights glint off her pallid legs. She is attractive, certainly, and her face friendly, surrounded by shortish straight brown hair that curls inwards to her neck just below the ear. Her teeth glimmer against the purple of her dress as she smiles dutifully at something the fat girl is saying. It is perhaps the most infectious smile Gary has ever seen, causing him in that moment to forget the impending torment of his initiation. She glances over at Gary. He whips his head back round to face the inverted bottles behind the bar, catching sight of his own reflection in the mirror that lies behind the line of spirits. He instantly remembers his fate. Gary’s face is an unwholesome white. His fringe is stuck to his forehead with a sweat that he can feel burning through every pore of his brow and his neck is bloated, bulging out at the sides of his collar and tie. He opens his mouth and sticks out a conspicuously furred tongue and makes a hushed ‘urrghh’ sound to his own reflection.
‘You look like shite’, he thinks to himself. ‘What are you doing?’ Gary pushes his folded arms forward to the back of the bar, lowering his back and putting his forehead to his arms. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck’, he mumbles to himself. ‘Idiot. You’re an idiot.’ ‘Get it down ya’, Rizza yells right into Gary’s ear and slapping him hard on the spine, then punching the air and unmelodically chanting. ‘Muv-ver fuck-ing innish-ee-ert.’ Sean walks up to the back of Rizza, puts one arm over his shoulder so that it dangles down in front of Rizza’s chest. With his other arm he raises an almost full pint of beer in the air before joining Rizza in his chant. They bounce up and down together, showering all in range with foam. Gary wipes the beer from his eyes and scoops up his own pint that Rizza had sloppily plonked on the bar in front of him.
‘No, they’re idiots’, Gary thinks as he takes a swig.
‘Down it!’ cries Sean, leaning in and pushing his face close into Gary’s so that they are almost brushing noses.
Sean’s glare is intense and so is his persona. Gary already knew of Sean’s reputation. ‘He’s a fucking maniac’, Daniel had told Gary on his first day at the university. ‘Just steer well clear when he’s had a few bevvies.’ Daniel captained the team and has a calm authority about him pitched in a warm, brotherly intonation, polished with a genial Yorkshire accent. Gary liked him a lot and certainly wished he were here to keep the idiots at bay. Daniel however is over the other side of the dance floor, his view blocked by a hundred or more silhouetted effervescent bodies. Gary inverts the pint glass a little by little, taking gulp after gulp. The bubbles scratch his throat as the beer gushes down. He feels his stomach resisting and closing its gates to any more liquid. Gary has to stop. He lowers the glass from his lips and takes a deep and lasting breath. He exhales and looks nervously at the contents of the glass; still a third full at least.
‘Disappointing’, says Rizza, twisting around and walking away, laughing heartily as he disappears into the crowd.
‘It’s not good is it, skinny lad?’ Sean says malignly. ‘Finish it up then.’
Gary proceeds to sip the remainder of his pint while Sean leans in over the bar, waving a ten pound note at the barman. He is duly served with two shot glasses of clear liquid.
‘Zambooka!’ Sean announces holding the two glasses between the finger and thumb in each hand and jiggling them about.
Gary reluctantly accepts the offering and chucks it down his throat in sync with Sean, who takes a moment to appreciate the fire stirring in his belly. He sucks in some air through his mouth and savours again. Gary is less enthusiastic about the sensation, spluttering a little before holding up his thumb to Sean as if to say ‘I’m okay, that was good’. Sean places a hand on Gary’s shoulder and leans in.
‘Nearly time, boy’, he says.
‘I know’, replies Gary pensively.
‘Can’t wait to see your bony butt on the dance floor’.
Sean turns and walks into the crowd, annoyingly chortling as he disappears behind the DJ box. Gary looks into the mirror once more, loosening the knot in his tie and flicking open the top button of his shirt. Much better; he can now breathe again. His focus turns from his own reflection to that of the girl in the purple dress. She pulls sophisticatedly on the curly straw with her lips. Her eyes flick upward to the mirror behind the bar and she again catches Gary looking. This time he does not look away. She smiles gently and turns to face her friends around the table. A horrifying thought suddenly enters Gary’s head.
‘Shit’, he mouths to his own reflection. ‘She’s gonna be watching too.’
He slides his arms across to the back of the bar and places his ear down on the hard, sticky surface. He closes his eyes hoping in vain this might all be a bad dream and he would wake any moment. But no, this is as real as it gets. This is his initiation.
10.44 pm: Vacillation
‘Hmmm’, Gary ponders. ‘They look so normal. And I guess they all survived.’
He moves his head in closer to the photo of the team hanging on the wall of the Union foyer. He squints at the photo. There is Rizza, and Daniel, and there is Steve and Sean on the front row. All good lads and all well-liked. Gary just wished this was all over so he too could concentrate on being a good, well-liked lad.
‘I can do this’, he gives himself some encouragement. ‘Not a problem.’
Gary stares vacantly at the photo some more. He looks at Rizza stood at the edge of the shot, hands behind his back, chest all puffed out proudly displaying the university crest. Gary flicks his eyes to Daniel stood central amongst the team holding the ball under his arm, which pushed out and accentuated his already well-pronounced bicep. Gary widens his eyes and retracts his head slightly. The team become a blur and his own inadequate reflection looms in the glass of the frame. His Adam’s apple protrudes sharply from his throat, bobbing up and down as he swallows.
‘This is so fucking stupid’, he mutters to himself. ‘I just want to play sport. This is fucking shite. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. Shit!’
He agitatedly strolls around the foyer, hands behind his head, occasionally stopping on the spot to exhale an overstated breath. The foyer is quiet with only the faint pulse of music seeping in through the crack of the door. The music suddenly grows louder as two men come into the foyer and then muffled again as the door swings shut. The men are both dressed in tight-fitting jeans and ripped, tatty t-shirts. One has a silver stud through his bottom lip. Gary guesses they are probably intellects of some kind. History students, perhaps. Clearly not sport students and not jocks. Not initiates. Gary looks them up and down as they peer at the pricing on the cigarette vending machine and shuffle around in their pockets for loose change. They are just here to gawk and poke fun. ‘Come for a right good fucking laugh, haven’t you?’ thinks Gary, giving the men an icy-cold glare. The vibrant bass fills the foyer again as the doors swing open and two girls come through arm in arm, giggling and twittering into each other’s ear. They stumble across the foyer, propping each other up as they go. It is the girl in the purple dress and one of her friends from the table. Before the doors have time to shut and seal out the DJ’s inflated patter into the microphone, Sean comes bursting through in hurried pursuit of the girls.
‘Ladies!’ he shouts after them before they can disappear into the toilets. The girls stop and turn to face Sean, who walks towards them with his arms up and out to the sides; he wraps them around the girls’ shoulders. Gary watches from a distance. He can’t hear what they are saying but the girls are clearly enamoured with Sean’s false, alcohol-induced audacity. Not to mention his body. Sean is triangular; his shoulders extending out a good few inches beyond his hips and his neck muscles sliding down and outwards from behind his ears to his shoulders in a perfect curve. Gary could swear he could see Sean’s pecs twitching through his shirt, even from behind.
‘You leave the purple dress alone’, Gary thinks, fiercely staring Sean in the back. Within a moment Sean leans in and locks mouths with the other girl. She is much taller than the girl in the purple dress – about Sean’s height – and has long blonde hair cascading down to the bottom of her back. She is wearing a very short silver dress and matching silver boots that lace right up to the knee. Gary can see her messily pasted, deep blue kohl as she holds her eyelids tightly shut and passionately embraces Sean. The girl in the purple dress rolls her eyes and disappears through the door to the toilets.
‘Yes!’ thinks Gary. ‘That’s right, you just walk away.’
Sean isn’t the prettiest player on the team but his splendid muscle and forceful, aggravating joviality more than make up for this. He is a lad and his laddish, juvenile charm seems to attract a certain kind of girl. Gary simultaneously loathed and coveted this charm; the kind of charm that, perhaps, was embodied by gameness for the valued rituals of the team. The ability to accept pain and humiliation, to laugh at the same time, transcends any bodily aesthetic. This is a gratifying thought, and one that causes an involuntary curve to one side of Gary’s top lip as he contemplates the possibilities. The history students cross the foyer in front of him, puffing clouds of smoke from the ends of their cigarettes, which twist and curl toward the high panelled ceiling before blending and vanishing into the shimmering white lights. Still taking solace in his thoughts, Gary’s eyes unconsciously follow the patterns of smoke, only distantly aware of the loudening music as the history students exit to the club.
‘Tonight could be a good night.’ Gary fantasizes about a come-on from the girl in the purple dress, so impressed with his initiate display. ‘Or it could be fucking horrendous.’
His thoughts quickly turn to the blacker side of the same coin. Perhaps she will laugh at him and his skinny, albino carcass. Perhaps she will think him an idiot, a misogynist and a pig. He turns sharply to his left and takes a few steps forward, as if he can simply walk away from such ghastly thoughts. But he can’t. They follow him those few paces, infiltrating his mind and wiping out any optimism that had resided there.
‘I’m not Sean. Or Rizza. Or any of those guys.’ He hangs his head. ‘I’m a skinny, albino cunt. She’s gonna laugh. They’re all gonna laugh. I’ll never fucking get away from it.’
The girl in the purple dress exits the toilets, taking time to quickly glance at Sean – still half-eating the girl in the silver boots – and crossing the foyer in front of Gary. She looks up to see his disconsolate posture and pushes her lips out and opens her eyes wide, as if to say ‘why so sad?’ Gary can’t respond. He wants to, but in that moment she terrifies him. All women terrify him. She walks on looking slightly despondent, and exits to the vibrancy of the club.
11.27 pm: Degradation
Gary is sitting motionless on the seat of the toilet, elbows dug into his scraggy thighs and head resting firmly in his hands. He is cold and naked and wishing he’d never come to this place.
‘Initiates’, comes a booming voice over the sound system. ‘Would you please gather on the dance floor?’
There is a distant roar of excitement that wraiths its way from the club to the men’s toilets, targeting and coiling itself round Gary with a paralysing chill. His heart hammers against his chest and his sphincter pulsates like a stereo’s subwoofer.
‘Oh, fuck’, Gary thinks to himself, staring intensely at the back of the cubicle door as if some vengeful, demonic beast is about to burst through it and devour him. ‘Oh, fuck; oh, fuck; oh, fuck. I’m not ready. I can’t do it.’
There is a loud banging on the door. The whole cubicle shudders. Gary leans forward on the toilet seat and puts his hands to the bolt to hold it in place and keep out whatever is on the other side.
‘Let’s see you then’, Rizza irreverently hollers. ‘We’re all waiting.’ ‘You okay in there?’ Daniel’s voice calms Gary a little. ‘It’s now or never, mate.’
‘Okay’, replies Gary, rising to his feet and guardedly sliding the bolt back and pulling open the cubicle door.
He steps out into the main toilet block. The contrast of light blinds him for a moment. Gary clenches his fists and draws a significant breath through firmly gritted teeth. He feels a slap on his behind, ushering him forward.
‘Go, go, go!’ Rizza yells.
Gary starts towards the door of the toilets in pursuit of a sea of ashen buttocks that ripple with motion. He had almost forgotten that others shared his fate but now that he sees them, naked and vulnerable as he is, he takes some comfort in it. He even feels competitive, scrambling to reach the door before them and be amongst the first to meet the expectant crowd. The initiates squeeze through the doorframe. Gary ducks down to an opening he’d spied on his approach and claws at the tiles on the foyer floor to pull him through. He gets to his feet and rushes toward the club past the few eager watchers that have gathered in the entrance. He can see their mouths widely open, but their voices are obscured by the yowl of the much larger crowd that awaits him on the dance floor. The tables to the left and bar area to the right are noticeably unoccupied. All and sundry have gathered around the dance floor to witness the start of the initiation. Around a pillar and the crowd loom large, parting just enough to leave a narrow path for the initiates to run through. Gary falls in line behind other initiates and enters the path. The noise is a deafening haze and all the ogling faces merge into one, spattered with the blaze of yellow and purple spotlights, nothing distinct about any of them. The surreality of it all is only fettered by Gary’s burning buttocks, which are being slapped hard by many of those he passes. He reaches the dance floor; a vast open space. The initiates spread out in a line, jogging on the spot and gracelessly cup their exposed penises. Gary swiftly remembers his own nakedness. He puts his chin to his chest and looks down at his exposed form; down his sallow, bony chest and obtruding ribs to his navel spattered with auburn hairs; down further to the flaccid inadequacy masked in the shadow of his hands. He closes his eyes to block out the reality. For Gary he is the only initiate on that floor; the subject of everyone’s gaze. He keeps his eyes firmly shut and allows his mind to drift. He wonders what his mother might think of him now. He wonders of the whereabouts of the girl in the purple dress. He wonders if she was watching. Gary wittingly raises his eyelids, tightly clamps his jaws and stares straight ahead with a look of determination. If he just seizes the moment and went with it, he thinks, at least no one could accuse him of an unmanly disinclination. He will put on a show for his peers, and for the girl in the purple dress.
Daniel emerges from the crowd and stands before the initiates holding a microphone to his lips. The crowd grow quiet in anticipation.
‘Ten star-jumps’, Daniel barks into the microphone.
Gary cannot move, reluctant to remove his hands from his groin. He looks left and then right at the other initiates around him. Some of them are tentatively raising their arms in readiness to jump. Some are already jumping, relishing the attention, with their dicks swinging violently in the air. Gary can but follow suit. He jumps like he used to in gym class when he was a boy. The swarm of delighted faces in front of him morph into nothingness; just a backdrop to his deliberately comforting boyhood apparition.
‘Leapfrog’, booms Daniel’s voice echoing around the speakers high on the Union walls.
Gary feels a push between his shoulder blades and a hand in his stomach, folding him forward till his back is parallel to the floor. He braces his knees and other initiates fly over his back, their hands push down hard on his spine. Gary straightens his back, a little disorientated.
‘Drinkie time!’ yells Daniel to a rapturous cheer of the crowd.
Sean approaches and pushes a plastic pint-sized cup into Gary’s hand. Gary gazes dubiously at the content for a moment, as if it is poison that will end his days. He has little choice but to drink, raising the cup to his open mouth and tipping it so the beer gushes. He guzzles hurriedly, determined to reach the bottom of the cup. He gasps at the end, only for Sean to snatch the empty cup from his grasp – with neither congratulation nor even recognition – and replace it with a shot of curious pink liquid. Gary forces the liquid down to his stomach in one big gulp, the sharp cinnamon taste rips into the walls of his throat. ‘Run left.’ Daniel’s once agreeable tone now tears through Gary’s senses with every one of his blunt words. ‘Left, left, left.’
Gary twists to the left and pushes off with his right leg, chasing the initiate in front anticlockwise around the dance floor. The floor is now saturated with spilled beer and every stride is hazardous. As the initiates go round and round, more of them fall victim to the slippery surface, uncouthly collapsing and sliding outwards to the feet of the watching crowd. The more spectacular the fall, the more rapacious the cry from the excited onlookers.
‘Okay’, says Daniel in a more composed tenor.
Gary slows his running and gradually comes to a halt. The sea of onlookers part again and Gary makes haste with the other initiates toward the exit and relative safety of the foyer. The bright light and relative quiet make for soothing surroundings, which allows Gary to take stock of what had just occurred. The experience will haunt him for time to come, but he is nonetheless impressed with the pluck of his own actions. He affords himself an inward smile as he catches his breath.
The initiates’ clothes lie in piles along one wall of the foyer, guarded closely by Rizza and the very burly Steve. It is Sean that has the reputation for hardness and lunacy, but his best friend, Steve, communicates the same message with equal effect. Where Sean is triangular, Steve is square. His stumped legs balance his rectangular torso running up to the shoulders that balance his equally cubed and unflinching, stubble covered face. The initiates all take immediate notice of Steve.
‘Right, here’s the drill’, he booms. ‘Elders will mark points along the way and show you which way to go. Basically, it’s a right out of here, onto the main road and one lap of the green and back here and into the club. Any questions?’
No one spoke out. After what they had just been exposed to, a quick run around the block is not going to faze Gary, however senseless it appears to him.
‘Good’, says Steve. ‘Now, underwear or shoes?’
‘What?’ asks Gary, speaking on behalf of all the stunned and bewildered initiates. ‘You can have your underwear or your shoes’, replies Steve in a deliberately condescending tone. ‘Which is it to be, lads?’
The bemused silence speaks volumes. They thought it was over and the trials were done. What Gary wants to say was, ‘Fuck this; just give me my clothes.’ But he doesn’t.
11.51 pm: Tribulation
The streets are quiet. Gary’s own rapid breathing and the pitter-patter of his bare feet on the hard, rough concrete are the only sounds. The warm autumn breeze embraces his mostly naked body as he trundles on to the next marker ahead. He’d been running for some time now and his feet hurt like never before. They are cut and bleeding and small stones and other sharp objects are becoming stuck between his toes making new cuts. Gary passes onto some smoother tarmac, easing the pain slightly, but his own drying blood make his feet stick to the surface with every stride, pulling on the broken skin and stinging. He clamps his jaws tightly shut attempting to block out the pain; he speeds up a little to catch the initiates in front. Those in shoes are now out of sight, probably coming close to the finish.
‘Come on’, he thinks to himself. ‘Nearly there.’
The sound of a car engine grows louder as it approaches Gary from behind. He pushes off the ground harder with his feet, attempting to pick-up the pace and be out of sight before the car can draw near. It is too late.
‘Shit’, he mumbles to himself through gritted teeth. ‘Just keep going.’
He puts his head down, facing slightly left in a bid to disguise his identity – as if anyone in this town would know him. The car speeds past, its loud tooting horn ricochets off the quiet night air, momentarily stopping Gary’s heart and pushing it into the bottom of his windpipe like a cork. The hairs on his neck stand-up and he is cold for the first time since venturing semi-naked out of the Union. The car disappears into the distance, but the coldness remains. Gary wishes he was anywhere but here. He inwardly mumbles to a god he rarely believes in, praying that he will reach the finish without further incident. Another car comes flashing by. This time a passenger leans out of the window, shouting something that Gary can’t make out and punches the air with his closed fist and then points and whoops as the car turns a corner and out of sight.
‘Just fuck off’, thinks Gary, his eyes slightly welling.
He continues onwards to a tree just up ahead where an Elder is slumped disinterestedly against the trunk. Gary holds back the tears, not wanting any of these idiots to see him cry. He isn’t going to give them that satisfaction – the knowledge that they had broken him or any ammunition for the future. The Elder glances at Gary as he approaches, then looks away again.
‘Just cut across the green and the brook, then get your skinny ass back to the Union’, he says.
Gary swings immediately left onto the green. The moist blades of grass spring up between his toes freeing them of rubble and caressing his wounds, and the soft turf beneath his feet puts enough bounce in his step to develop into a sprint. To his right, Gary sees the blue and yellow of the parked police cars outside the station flickering between the trees as he runs like the images of a zoetrope. They are an unwelcome sight, but spur him to run faster and reach the Union and end this ordeal. The narrow brook looms a short distance ahead. Gary plans to jump it in one, playing it out in his head. He shortens his stride as he approaches and pushes down hard on his right leg to launch him across. Gary sails through the air, clears the brook and lands awkwardly on the opposite bank. He scrambles to his feet, bearing left onto the road once more; the home stretch back to the Union. His sprint over the green had allowed him to catch some initiates. Their calves twitch sharply under the burden of heavy and weary strides back toward the campus. Gary feels safer in their company as the panoptic glare of car headlights come towards him. He hides himself behind the group of semi-naked runners in front of him as the car passes, then squeezes between them and runs on into the shade of the campus grounds. He can once again hear the furore of the Union and see the lights billowing out of the glass-fronted foyer. Just a short time earlier the vibrant density of clubbers at the Union had petrified him; now it seems like paradise.
12.06 am: Realization
Gary leans into the wall, catches his breath and takes in the unfolding scene around him. The initiates leap joyfully around the foyer, leaving their bloody footprints on the white tiled floor. They wrap arms around one another and hug, and stop to cheer as yet another naked initiate plods wearily in through the door. They hug him too and beckon Gary to join them. They’d been strangely divided by a common peril – shut off from one another by their own fears about their bodies and their capabilities – but are now united in celebration of its ending. Now they can get to know each other and embrace each other’s company as members of the team, the ordeal of the initiation serving as an ice-breaker and a strong thread that will bind them for the years to come.
The jubilant initiates stumble through the doors to the club, greeting the awaiting crowd with triumphant punches to the air. The cheers penetrate Gary’s body filling him with unfamiliar warmth that rushes through every inch of him like a torrent, flooding his spirit with a confidence he’d never felt before. He feels muscular. He feels powerful. He feels like a Sean. His head twitches left and right as he frantically searches the packed club for the girl in the purple dress. She’d been right in front of him the whole time, perched on stall, avidly acclaiming the new initiates. She’d seen the initiation. She’d seen all of Gary. He doesn’t care anymore. He winks at her. She smiles coyly and extends her clapping hands out in front of her to give Gary special appreciation. Later Gary would learn her name. Just to her right, Gary can barely make out the figures of Rizza and Daniel in the murky shadows ahead. Daniel is applauding vigorously. Rizza outstretches his fists and raises his thumbs to Gary. Sean emerges from behind a pillar, beaming with pleasure and holding a bottle in each hand.
‘Welcome to the team’, he says, passing Gary a beer. ‘You skinny little fuck.’ Gary smiles broadly and raises his bottle to meet Sean’s with a clink. He throws back his head and tosses down the liquid. Never had a beer tasted so good.
Conclusion, or a tale of writing a tale (continued): So, isn’t this all just about masculinity?
To a certain extent, like Douglas and Carless (2010: 347), I see it as ‘futile to try to summarize the insights the story provides [since] these insights are best expressed through the story itself’ and form and content are inseparable (Sparkes and Douglas, 2007). However, given the limited knowledge of initiation rituals, especially in the UK, some discussion I think is warranted. This discussion should not detract from the initiation that has been ‘shown’ and I do not make claims that my response to the data and to the tale is any more or less legitimate than any other. The rationale for a tale, in part, is that the story, or rather the response to it, cannot be controlled since the tale is constructed on narrative which itself ‘is a form of social action and the act of narration is a social activity involving other participants who may provide storied responses to a story heard’ (Smith and Sparkes, 2011: 39). I should reiterate that I am confident about ‘the facts’ of the tale, including the familiar discourse of macho laddism, the competitiveness, the nudity, the heavy drinking and the pursuit of girls, and their implied association with hegemonic masculinity. I might have chosen to tease out these facts and embed them in a realist tale of collective masculinity and body reflexive practices (see Connell, 2005). Instead I choose to let them stand ‘as are’ but also acknowledge that I cannot forcibly deny my own pro-feminist and realist roots in writing the tale. Through this lens the tale speaks of masculinity in as much as it speaks of my own knowledge of macro- and micro-social processes that inevitably guide the course of my research. As Richardson (1990: 12) writes, ‘no textual staging is ever innocent’. But I also hope that it speaks of the lived experience of male initiates, which is infinitely more complex and incompatible with the centred and essentialist interpretations of these processes. I have attempted elsewhere, in a study of collegiate football players’ relationships with academia (Clayton, 2010), to problematize my own ‘modern’ thinking, to both centre and decentre ideologies, and in doing so to critique the idea of ‘sport masculinities’ and the (re)production of ‘jocks’. I concluded, reticently, that while athletic men’s lifeworlds appear to ‘hum of hegemonic masculinity’, the men do not pursue the patriarchal dividend and instead seek security from the ephemerality of their own lives and the bowdlerizing of an itinerant society. This conclusion was made by way of a reanalysing and (re)presenting of previously gathered, analysed and published data, specifically by ‘restoring the reality’ by avoiding a thematic analysis and subsequent realist account and instead presenting a pseudo-fictional story. It was a conclusion that differed markedly from those previously drawn from the same data set (Clayton and Humberstone, 2006, 2007) simply because less was missing, the richness of experience (both my own and those of the participants) remained intact. This tale attempts to provide an equally inclusive representation of sport initiation, one that presents the ‘inconvenient truth of [a story] that [has] been unheard’ (Frank, 2000, cited in Douglas and Carless, 2010: 349), thus offering something more ethical, less constraining and a challenge to the castigation of politically informed accounts of Dionysian/Epicurean practice. Its contribution to a sociology of masculinities is to be found in the readers’ response to it and the stories they imagine and tell, which paves the way for a more balanced representation of men (as opposed to masculinity), complexities, contradictions, contingencies and all. Each response will ‘compete for attention’ (Smith and Sparkes, 2011: 45), thus (further) opening-up a dialogue that has already begun in masculinities research (see Beasley, 2008; Hearn, 2004; Jefferson, 2002; Pringle, 2005; Wetherell and Edley, 1999; Whitehead, 1999, 2002; see also Connell and Messerschmidt, 2005).
A similar contribution to dialogue, gauged by responses to this story of initiation, might also benefit the body of knowledge that currently sits, largely unchallenged, in the far smaller but related area of sport initiation research. Much of this research makes central the idea, and malevolence therein, of athletic ‘hazing’. This is a vexed term, but one that Crow and MacIntosh (2009: 449) attempt to give meaning to as: Any potentially humiliating, degrading, abusive, or dangerous activity expected of a junior-ranking athlete by a more senior team-mate, which does not contribute to either athlete’s positive development, but is required to be accepted as part of a team, regardless of the junior-ranking athlete’s willingness to participate.
Such a definition, built on athletic protagonists’ own understandings of hazing, is limited by its own boundlessness. Crow and MacIntosh are careful to note that there is confusion as to what constitutes hazing, and similarly Kirby and Wintrup (2002) recognize that what one person might call humiliation, degradation, abuse, and so on, another may not. Therefore, for me, definitions such as this are of little consequence and, again, it is the story of one in response to the story of another (such as the tale above) that might better open dialogue and begin to form an understanding of initiation and the lived experience of initiation. If this tale raises one question, it is perhaps the question of whether or not Gary was, or felt, ‘hazed’. One reading of this will compete for attention with others, each, perhaps, promoting a different political strategy. Gary was almost certainly ‘initiated’; he underwent a process of transformation, but it would be difficult to assert that this transformation was anything more than ephemeral. The tale depicts a transformation of feelings (simplistically, from negative to positive feelings), which is different to movement through fixed phases of identity consolidation (see Johnson and Holman, 2004). The tale might lead to questions about the transformative potential and reality of initiation rituals. Was a fully initiated Gary any different, any ‘better’, than the Gary that came to university and signed-up to the team a few weeks previous? Or did the ritual simply allow him to overcome the anxieties that the ritual itself created? I do not disagree with much of the literature about male sport initiations, the common patterns they appear to follow, the rationale of identity consolidation and the dissemination of a masculine logic, but it is not my intention here to make such truth claims. The benefit of this tale of ‘reality’ is that it merely exposes what is done, and allows the active and situated reader to ‘control’ the meaning of its prose.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the collegiate football players who tolerated my presence during the original ethnography way back in 2002 and the rugby players that provided me with insights into their experiences of initiation in 2009. It is these men that created the characters and the plot for my tale. I also thank the ‘new batch’ of football and rugby students who took time to read my tale of initiation and comment on its ‘realness’. Finally, I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and positive feedback on an earlier draft of this article.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.