Book Reviews
Sociology of Sport Journal, 2011, 28, 380-383
© 2011 Human Kinetics, Inc.
The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White
By Doug Merlino, Bloomsbury, 2011, New York
Reviewed by Jeffrey Montez de Oca, Department of Sociology, University of
Colorado, Colorado Springs.
People in the United States widely believe that sport is a moralizing activity and a
pathway to social mobility. As such, it gets embraced as a productive activity, especially for poor racial minorities. This belief has its roots in the Muscular Christian
Movement of the nineteenth century, but it has always been based more on belief
than evidence. Another popular belief in the United States is that its history is one
of constant progress away from imperfection and towards perfection. A prime
example of this was evident in the view that the U.S. had become a “post-racial”
society following the election of Barack Obama. The post-race belief allows people
to negotiate Americans’ contradictory belief in equality and opposition to programs
that would ameliorate persistent racial inequalities.
The Hustle by Doug Merlino questions the efficacy of sport as a means of
moral discipline and social mobility by tracing the lives of ten men who played
basketball together as adolescents in Seattle, Washington in 1986. The team was an
experiment in fostering racial integration; particularly so a few African American
boys could gain access to elite white schools. Given the demographics of Seattle,
the black kids were largely low-income and from the South Side while the white
kids came from the affluent North Side. As the men look back in time, they see the
team was largely successful in creating a space where black and white boys could
break down social distance, get to know each other, and develop relationships even
if most were only fleeting. That is no mean feat in a segregated society structured
by persistent racial and class inequality.
The team was much less effective in fulfilling sport’s bolder promises. The white
kids who started out wealthier ended up wealthier than their African American counterparts. They had an easier time negotiating the difficult years of adolescence and
consistently did better in school. The African American boys who did gain entrance
into elite white-dominated schools grappled with racism and isolation. Most of the
African Americans struggled on the streets, especially as drugs boomed in Seattle’s
underground economy, and they pieced together less stable employment than their
white counterparts. The streets led one boy to an untimely and grisly death while
others struggled to survive adolescence. Only one of the African American men
achieved clear material success, which is attributable more to his personality than to
sport participation. But if one factors overcoming obstacles and happiness into the
definition of success, as I suspect Merlino might, then the picture evens. One man
who discovered a path out of the street through religion provides a particularly clear
example. At this point in his life, he is certainly not wealthy, however he appears
to have found a contentment that only one of the white men can match. The larger
point is that although sport participation carries personal benefits, it does not by itself
alter a person’s material conditions of life. The shortcoming of sport as a means of
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social control and mobility is that while it may offer a person a positive attitude,
increased confidence, and moral discipline, it does little to provide marketable skills,
lessen other people’s racism, pay for necessities, or bleach a person’s skin in the
way Pear’s Soap advertised in the nineteenth century.
The basketball team is a touchstone that Merlino uses to explore wider issues
of race and class. In particular, the story of these men challenges the idea that the
United States is a post-racial society. Race was and continues to be a salient force
structuring the opportunities and challenges faced by these men. The individual
stories of the different men discussed in The Hustle are compelling. However, the
strongest sections of the book deal with the private school that he and the other
white kids attended while playing on the basketball team. In particular, Merlino
effectively traces the many contradictions and ironies implicit to an elite education
in a society structured by class and racial inequalities. People familiar with similar
institutions at the high school and college level will recognize the celebration of
diversity and the discomfort with racial language that plays out in these institutions.
Ultimately, Merlino demonstrates the strong resistance that many well-intentioned
white people have to meaningful change. The stories of how both students and teachers of color try to negotiate the contradictory racial landscape are very powerful.
Most sport sociologists will find little new in this book. But it is written for a
popular audience and that really isn’t the point of such books. Popular sport books
are most valuable when they make complex issues and relationships clear through
the familiar idiom of sport. To that end, The Hustle is inconsistent. Some chapters
are startling in their clarity and poignancy. Other chapters could have been edited
down or even omitted. The early section on the basketball team is probably the least
compelling and a bit jarring as Merlino jumps up and back between the story of the
boys and histories of Seattle and of race relations in the United States. His discussion
of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois is interesting but does not seem to
provide as much analytical content as it might. Merlino is very strong when it comes
to teasing out the complicated dynamics of race and class but he is less successful
at analyzing gender. Since it is a book about young men coming of age, The Hustle
would have been stronger with a more incisive analysis of masculinities. Overall,
The Hustle is an engaging book that strives to be both scholarly and accessible. I
suspect many students would find it interesting. It could be useful in classes in private
liberal arts colleges. Others may find the book a bit long for undergraduate classes
and lacking a strong theoretical-methodological framework for graduate courses.
Ultimately, this book is probably most useful for college-educated readers who enjoy
learning about complex social processes through personal stories.
Revolt of the White Athlete: Race, Media and the
Emergence of Extreme Athletes in America
By Kyle Kusz, Peter Lang Publishing, 2007, New York, NY.
Reviewed by David J. Leonard, Department of Critical Culture, Gender and Race
Studies, Washington State University, Pullman, WA.
Unlike the revolt of the black athlete, which during the 1960s saw African American
athletes using their power and platform to address persistent inequality and global
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apartheid, the revolt of the white athlete, according to Kyle Kusz, is a battle against
a perceived lost power in order to sustain hegemonic privilege.
In his book, Revolt of the White Athlete: Race, Media, and the Emergence
of Extreme Athletes in America, Kyle Kusz illustrates the various ways in which
whiteness is articulated, imagined and centered within contemporary sports culture. Exploring the intersections of race, class, gender, and nation—in discussions
that range from Andre Agassi and Lance Armstrong to extreme sports and sport
films—Kusz offers insight into the ways in which sports and the cultural politics
of sports represented an important site of ideological and representational meaning
during the 1990s. The power of this work transcends the specific examples; it lies
with Kusz’s effort to deconstruct narratives around whiteness and to highlight the
powerful ways that sport celebrates and elevates white athletic bodies.
Kusz focuses on the importance of sports—narratives, representations,
­signifiers—during the 1990s as a space of “white revolt.” He defines this revolt
as a “struggle to shape, limit, and organize how Americans imagine whiteness
and race more generally...” It “is an important socio-cultural force of new millennium America involved in a struggle over what ideas get defined as reality of
race in American society” (p. 9). This is evident in the sports media focus on the
disappearing white athlete or the white minority basketball player or quarterback.
Imagining the white athlete as a sporting Other, a minority of sorts who has lost
control, the sporting world (like other institutions) sought to imagine whiteness as
victim (as lacking privilege) while highlighting and celebrating the beauty, power,
and primacy of white male athleticism.
For example, in chapter 4, Kusz explores the ascendance of extreme sports in
a commercial sense and in terms of the activities themselves as part of the white
revolt. He highlights the ways in which extreme sports are celebrated as a space
of whiteness, especially in opposition to those commercial sports perceived to be
dominated by black athletes. Through its “depiction of the Extreme sportsman—a
white masculinity that is strong, brave, sovereign, demonstrably superior, and in
control of himself” the narratives and representations offered within extreme sporting discourses challenged “a perceived crisis of white masculinity” (p. 74). Kusz
expands on these ideas in a chapter titled, “I want to be the Minority: The politics of
Youthful White Masculinity in Sport and Popular Culture in 1990s America.” Here,
Kusz links the “revolt of the white athlete” to the broader cultural and social formations that, during the 1990s, consistently depicted “the white male as victim” (p. 80).
Using sporting texts to highlight the nature and meaning of this revolt, Kusz
situates the sporting revolt within a larger social and political movement, while
noting the specificity and unique attributes of an athletic revolt. From the ways in
which race is circulated in a sporting context (and the visibility of African Americans) to the primacy of strength, the American Dream, nationalism, and individualism, Kusz focuses on the power and importance of a “revolt . . . not taking place in
the streets” but “so cleverly disguised in the construction and coding of the imagery
and narratives selected for viewing through the mainstream media” (p. 11).
At one level, Kusz offers a discussion of whiteness within sports culture in
general terms, demonstrating the ways in which racial formation takes place through
and within various sporting institutions. At another level, Revolt of the White
Athlete represents a very precise and focused examination of “white-dominated
sports formations during the 1990s.” Linking sports to broader movements within
popular culture, politics, the American academy, and other institutions, Kusz argues
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that sports was at the forefront “in the construction of popular narratives which
featured (or implicitly relied upon) a dramatic discursive reversal of the American
racial order and of racial power in the United States that disavowed systematic
white privilege” (p. 3).
One of the definite shortcomings with the text is that at times there is a repetitive rehashing of the methodological and theoretical frameworks. This results in
a narrative that at times fails to deliver a cohesive trajectory. As a collection of
essays, each chapter feels separate rather than complementary because of the lack
of dialectical focus and the tendency to repeat. For example, in several chapters,
Kusz discusses the implications of the study of whiteness; likewise, he references
Sports Illustrated’s cover on “What Happened to the White Athlete?” in several
spots. The power of his analysis, however, and the importance of the discussion of
whiteness within a sport context, excuse some of these organizational shortcomings.
The difficulty of cultural studies, and specifically sports studies, is producing
scholarship that is transcendent. Focusing on specific instances and examples, cultural sports studies build upon the everyday to reflect upon and comment on larger
social forces. Yet, the focus on commentary and using contemporary examples as
points of entry results in scholarship that has the potential to be dated at publication.
Kyle Kusz avoids this trap by offering a focused text that seeks to comment on the
specific circumstances of the 1990s. Amid a discourse of multiculturalism and the
purported coloring of the American cultural, political and social landscape, Kusz
successfully argues that sports offered a space of resistance and revolt to this perceived lost power. The contextual specificity and the effort to ground his examples
in the broader context of the 1990s guarantee the continued relevance of his work.
Despite offering a very historically focused and contained discussion of the “revolt
of the white athlete,” Kusz provides a useful template for further analysis. In other
words, through his discussion of the 1990s and his examination of extreme sports,
Andre Agassi, and Lance Armstrong, readers are offered a powerful foundation
from which to reflect on the ongoing revolt of/around the white athlete.
Kusz’s work adds layers to contemporary discussions about Lance Armstrong
and to media coverage surrounding performance enhancing drugs. Similarly, our
collective understanding of Andre Agassi’s admission of drug addiction and of
the emergence of extreme sports into the mainstream is enhanced through Kusz’s
work. Kusz’s discussion also helps us to understand the redemptive stories reserved
for the likes of Ben Roethlisberger and Josh Hamilton, the cultural celebration of
NASCAR and the Little League World Series, and countless other instances that
“naturalize [the] connection between whiteness and American identity” (p. 12).
In 2005, C. Richard King cautioned scholars about the turn to/with whiteness
within sports studies. He called for those interested in critically literate analysis
of whiteness in sport to “think less about racial identities and attitudes and more
about the racial projects in which individuals and institutions engage through
sports” (405). Kusz finds success here, noting how sports functions as a site of
making and remaking whiteness in the context of America’s racial retreat (see Omi
and Winant, 1994) during the 1980s and 1990s. Focusing on “knowledge, power,
positionality and play: ‘who plays whom; who plays for whom; who plays with
whom; who watches whom . . . in sum who wins and who loses’” (King, 2005,
p. 406; King and Springwood, 2001, p. 160), Kusz offers an important discussion
of white sporting cultures and its interface with spatial, social, cultural, and racial
inequality/injustice.