Muhammad Ali: America’s B-Side  

Oleh:

Abdel-Shehid, Gamal

Jenis: Article from Journal - e-Journal
Dalam koleksi: Journal of Sport and Social Issues vol. 26 no. 3 (Aug. 2002), page 317-325.
Fulltext: 317.pdf (91.66KB)

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In the early 21st century, there are a few things that we can say with certainty about the United States if we look back over the past 100 years. The first is that it is a nation that is constantly at war. Whether it is Cuba, Haiti, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon, Cambodia, or dozens of other countries, it is safe to say that warring against relatively defenseless underdeveloped countries has been a central component in protecting the very existence of the United States in the past 100 years. Unfortunately, as current events outline, there seems to be little chance of this pattern stopping. The second thing that can be said about the United States is, more than any other, it is a sporting-mad nation. Although it is true that other countries throughout the world can at times be sporting-mad (e.g., Brazil for soccer,Pakistan and India for cricket), it is not true that these countries feature a constant diet of different professional and amateur sports that occupy the calendar for 52 weeks of the year with almost no respite. As such, within this constant interchanging, and sometimes converging, economy of war and sport, the athlete in the United States takes on a very important cultural and political role. As such, it could be argued that two of the most important cultural and political roles in the United States are athlete and soldier. And more often than not, in the United States, to be an athlete means to be a soldier. It just so happens that in the United States, this pool of laborers from which athletes and soldiers are drawn is by and large is the same. Athletes and soldiers in the United States come largely and disproportionately from the African American population, a population that traces its ancestry to those who came as slaves to the country 300 to 450 years ago.

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