Healthy Body, Healthy Mind

While searching for a show and tell object, I came across some stuff that makes for an interesting addition to the strains of discourse outlined by Oriard. Apparently, as college football was becoming mass entertainment in the 1890's, the phenomenon was met with less enthusiasm by some. In the Atlantic in 189?, a long article laments the signs that "the standard of sport has fallen...professionalism has crept in" (64). College athletics, formerly an elite tradition of mind/body refinement brought over from England, was in danger of moving away from what Bourdieu calls "disinterestedness" - the privilege of forming one's habits and practices independently of any kind of need for financial or cultural capital. Even more, an article in the Christian Observer in 1900 laments the decline in the intellectual quality of subsidized football players: "Let us have athletics in colleges, by all means. But tuition in football, which turns out blockheads, comes quite too high for the cost" (22). These lines of argument seem to be worth paying attention to, seeing as they have a significant place in contemporary discourse. In the aughts of this century and the last alike, outcry against overpaid and underintellectualized college atheletes, whose labor on the field, diamond, court, rink, etc. has become one of the more significant entertainment commodities out there, but whose wages are paid in cultural capital, is worth thinking about - not only because it is one of the more bizarre relations of labor power and compensation out there, but also because of its power as a discourse on race, class, and gender.