Abstract
Beginning with passions invoked by songs ‘You and Me’ and ‘Ode to the Motherland’, in the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, this paper examines sports institutions via their structures of feeling, passions connected to their reasons. War and peace and nation and state tend to dominate study of politics of sport. But here we find cities in longstanding, elective public–private partnership with professional team sports because the teams provide spectators quest for excitement, safe intensity they pursue enthusiastically. Contrast with the management motives romanticised in Moneyball enables us to see this remarkable form of desire in Katie Casey, the fictional heroine of the vaudeville classic, ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’. While the elective anthem of the English, ‘Jerusalem’, reveals distinct passions – connected more closely to muscular Christianity and its moral imperialism – ‘Take Me Out’ suggests, as do close studies of spectators in Japan, China and elsewhere in East Asia, that a quiet politics of safe intensities vies with official efforts in China and elsewhere to enlist sport into patriotic triumphalisms. The virtual contest between Olympism and professional team sports is thus another tension line along which the future of China and East Asia is being fashioned.
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