This Sporting Life: the antithetical novel’s revelation of the organization and work of sport

Abstract

The novel This Sporting Life by David Storey is used in this article as fictive, ethnographic data to explore the relationship between sports work, industrial organization, identity, and the management of the body. Drawing upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on sport, and rugby specifically, and the relationship between sport, the body, class and rationalization this paper argues that David Storey provides a vivid, if pessimistic, fictional, and semiautobiographical account of the ways in which sports, and sports work specifically, is driven by management discourses of rationality and control. We examine how this functions as class exploitation where labour is embodied and expended as a form of bodily capital. Lastly we offer a critique of the precarious social mobility that sports work promises. Through Storey's Rugby League playing fictional anti-hero-Art Machin-we explore the central struggle between social structures and individual agency.

Sport, life, This Sporting Life, and the hypertopia

“…35 It is as if the film, having started at full speed, has gradually unspooled, just as the physical energy needed to maintain Machin's ability to excel has become consumed, 'the human motor' worn down. 36 The last words of the film, as Machin's legs betray him and he fails to keep up with the action, is a jibe from the crowd: 'C'mon Machin, get a bloody move on'. It signifies his exit from hypertopic space; unable to maintain the pace, he is now reduced to being a mere mortal.…”

“…Beverly Geesin and Simon Mollan state: 'Machin understands that, as a forward, he is the "ape" of the game, valued for his size and brute force as opposed to intellect'. 41 Rugby league, though, is less about strength and more about speed and dynamism, with Eichberg arguing this streamlining of the physique is part of a specifically modern interest in energy. 42 Machin is always a charged figure, just like a body on a sports field; he tends to either inhabit the edge of the frame (the actor Richard Harris employs a fine line in Brandoesque brooding), or takes centre stage.…”