Attention la femme! Intimate relationships and male sports performance

This chapter sought to show how relationships with women, which for men in most walks of life might be regarded as unremarkable, can take on a problematic character for sportsmen. Attempts are made, therefore, to arrest the psychosocial development of sporting prodigies such as Tiger Woods in the fear that the sporting focus will be distracted by developing a close relationship with women, that they will develop alternative priorities, and that as a consequence sporting performance might decline. An implied pact is made requiring that view of the world is restricted to the game, and that other commitments are systematically subordinated - a recipe for an indulged infantilization of sportsmen that can hardly be regarded as healthy. This curious state of affairs has been produced by the persistent belief that sportsmen should focus exclusively on sports, in sharp contrast to the predominant views that sportswomen's success is reliant on the support of key men, such as husbands and coaches (McKay, Messner, and Sabo, 2000). Because the male body in sport is the key means of generating, sustaining, and accumulating what Bourdieu (1984) calls "physical capital," women tend to be regarded negatively as agents for the dissipation and siphoning off of that capital. However, when the male sports body is in crisis, a stable relationship with a woman is commonly prescribed as a means of rehabilitating its capacity to function as physical capital at an elite level.