ABSTRACT
The Super Bowl has become the cultural event of American life, one of many indications that sports, especially the more violent ones like football, have become like a religion or a nationalist ideology to which everyone bows. Sports seem to unite the races, social classes, and the political left and right as well. Although women may watch the Super Bowl in growing numbers, football idolizes that other thing that women can never have-muscle mass. Sports events like the Super Bowl are filled with military language at the same time that football imagery has become the "root metaphor of American political discourse." George Bush dubbed the 1992 Gulf War his "Super Bowl." The potent mix of football, political order, war, and scripted emotion, which was starkly and regularly
The most popular and highest status boys are in the "athletic clique" of high schools. Athletic programs demand huge slices of school budgets, and coaches can be gods with a capability of making or ruining a school and its community. Despite these undisputed facts, little attention has been given to the significance and effects of competitive athletics and their brand of masculinity within contemporary discussions of teaching, schooling, and school reform. That is, sports in schools, especially in high schools, have generally been treated as a separate spher1e-extracurricular, court-or field-based. This chapter seeks to understand male-dominated athletics as a systemic "logic of practice" and to map their influences on school culture, teaching, curricula, and our ideas of successful teenagers.
