ABSTRACT
The horizons of an athlete’s world can never stray far beyond her body. The course of an athletic career entails development of the ability to focus increasingly greater amounts of awareness on increasingly specific parts of the body.... The horizons of an intellectual’s world lie at the edge of an ever-expanding cosmos of ideas that seems to recede further and further from the body. Athletes are very much in their bodies and, as a consequence, are usually very much within the systems that sustain those bodies. Intellectuals are forever trying to escape beyond bodies and the systems that sustain them .... The chasm between the detachment from the body that characterizes much social science and the limited focus on the body that characterizes sports is difficult to bridge. (Brownell 1995:7-8)
