ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of sport in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 (9/11). Within a moment of hot nationalism (Billig, 1995), sport became appropriated and mobilised by an amalgam of corpo-political entities as part of the immensely public grieving that resonated in this specific moment in history. This was a moment in which: an American sense of ontological security was jeopardised by disruption; there was a recognition and realisation that America is part of this finite world (Dallmayr, 2002); and, there emerged an exacerbated re-emergence of national sentiment. Indeed, at a time of forced material and discursive reflection on/of ‘Americanness’ – a re-examination of nationhood at a fundamental level – popular (read mediated) sporting spectacle provided an unprecedented space for the critical interrogation of the American national imaginary in the wake of 9/11.
