Susan: Wha's Like Her?

Abstract

This comes from the heart. It does not attempt to range over Susan's stature as a scholar or her impact on and devotion to the field and the profession or the programs and institutions she has led and served or the students and colleagues she has mentored and inspired or the righteous causes for which she has fought. I could write boatloads on all of that and not come anywhere near to doing her justice.1Susan is one of the dearest, truest friends I will ever have. (And if you can't help hearing the paeans to Sergeant Raymond Shaw from The Manchurian Candidate when you read that, don't worry, Susan is right there laughing along with you—she has a finely tuned sense of irony.)Knowing she believed in me got me through what used to be the standard trials academicians face: finishing the dissertation, landing the first job, finishing the book, earning tenure, staying sane. And “Ay [in the last, truly] there's the rub”—because, in my various career crises, it was Susan's unstinting care and support and great wisdom that sustained and propelled me. Whether it was a timely word to an unsympathetic senior colleague who would be voting on my tenure; a finely crafted, impeccably documented annual review; an earthy “What the f**k do they know?” in response to a harsh reader's report, Susan had my back. There must be scores of others whose careers she has advanced by writing for them or with them, by reviewing drafts of dissertations, conference papers, articles, book proposals, by painstakingly but kindly critiquing work, by giving her time, attention, and encouragement. Actually, if memory serves, when a group of us sat around at NASSH in Boise, Idaho, in the halcyon BC (before Covid) days when we were planning to celebrate and honor Susan with a University of Iowa pre-NASSH conference, the list of just her former graduate students went far beyond the scores into the hundreds (someone might still have the original document); the number of others whom she has thus helped is surely incalculable.Early on, I was clueless about the mighty work Susan did to shepherd students and junior faculty through at Iowa because it was of that make-no-fuss-and-generous-to-a-fault kind that is so true to her being. She terrified me on first meeting—such a luminary in the field, whose 1988 article “Discourses on the Gender/Sport Relationship: From Women in Sport to Gender Relations”2 inspired an underwhelming attempt on my part to assay something similar on sport historiography. She was awesome. Our offices in the UI Fieldhouse were kind of kitty-corner, and I would scuttle past hers on the way to mine, terrified lest our eyes met and I would have to try and talk to her. For who-knows-how-long this went on and then she broke the ice, coming into the doorway to invite me to join her and Bonnie (Slatton, then the department chair) and Peg (Burke, former department chair) for lunch in a nearby dormitory cafeteria. If you want to begin to get to know Susan, you need to be with her when she is having a good chow-down. Once I realized that this woman loved Tater-Tots and felt queasy at the sight of too-much-green in the comestible line—except for the famous, luminous punch that Joyce (Murphy, our beloved administrative assistant) served up at the Department of Sport Studies (DSS) end-of-semester celebration—I realized that I didn't need to be awed by her, that we might even become friends; and over many such similar meals, we did.Or maybe it was during the late Friday afternoon gatherings of faculty and graduate students at two fine establishments in downtown Iowa City, Micky's Pub and, more latterly, Donnelly's. Again, how can you not love rather than be awed by a woman who loves a nice pint of Guinness, properly poured? Or a pint of Boddies (Boddingtons bitter, the Cream of Manchester)? Or—be still my beating heart—a sweet Speyside single malt? Most of us rarely savored more than one or two such bevvies, and we did have some great scholarly discussions, as well as almost-classic-British-banter (without any of the mean nasty stuff that it too often peddles). Above all, to my mind, these sessions helped work a special magic that brought the faculty and graduate students in the Sport Studies Program together. The tenor was, I think, much less cut-throat competitiveness than genuine and supportive collegiality; of course, I cannot claim to speak for everybody on this. However, the fact that just about every one of the largest cohort of PhD students the DSS ever admitted went on to successful completion of degree and a tenure-track position would suggest that somebody was doing something exceptional—and it was Susan who was doing it.Not the least of Susan's achievements is that because of her university-wide collegiality and standing among her peers, when the restructuring central administrators’ axe fell on the 100-years’ old DSS in 2009–10, we found a welcoming place in the Department of American Studies. Susan had long held a partial appointment and played leadership roles in that department, and DSS students benefitted from her reflected glory as both the undergraduate major and the graduate programs were able to continue under its aegis; I shamelessly traded on her esteem to find a home there too. That restructuring and that move really brought home to me what I had long known but not fully acknowledged—that I had ridden on Susan's coattails to my third decade at Iowa and to the associate professorship above which I would not rise.It is to Susan I owe any feminist-scholar-chops I might claim, and since her retirement, I have felt the same aching loss and lack of resolve I felt after my dad's death in 2014. And so, it seems appropriate to close whatever-kind-of-contribution to the special issue this piece amounts to, with a story I have often told about the two of them, one that has a pleasing circularity and something of a political poetry about it, one I think they could both enjoy.I had a fairly finely tuned socialist sensibility when the chance to join Iowa's DSS as a visiting lecturer came up in August 1989, but any sense of feminism was way in the distance. Somehow or other, in the northern English working-class communities in which I'd grown up, feminism was a tad too exotic to figure in my political education. Socialism, even communism, ran through our family's life blood, but that other -ism? Quite likely, the fact that my mum and her sisters had only recently, and barely, managed to scramble into that exquisitely tenuous “the-wife-not-having-to-have-go-out-to-work” economic bracket was an important factor. But so too was the blindingly obvious fact that hardly any women, let alone feminist women, figured in the corpus of high school and university texts that fed my intellectual hunger; and that popular culture in ’60s and ’70s Britain peddled a relentlessly anodyne heterosexual femininity; and that, through those decades, I was pretty relentlessly fine with my own anodyne heterosexual femininity. When I arrived at Iowa, then, absolutely clueless about feminism in any form or of any brand, it was a delight to be embraced by the generous, welcoming version that the DSS faculty produced and practiced.Susan (as well as Bonnie, Peg, and the redoubtable Chris Grant, director of the Women's Athletic Department and associate professor in sport studies) taught me that feminism is about making the world better for everyone, and as a recent convert, I, of course, set about trying to convert everyone else I knew and loved, my dad included. He had raised three daughters who each in their own ways took on cultures and societies and institutions and workplaces that were not set up in ways that would allow them easily to thrive. Dad knew my work, and he valued it; but he was, well into his ’80s, a dyed-in-the-wool man-of-a-certain-age with some fairly reactionary notions. And one thing he could not get his head around was the idea of diverse gender and sexual identities. We had lots of energetic discussions on the matter, especially during major sporting events such as the Olympics, Wimbledon, and the World Cup (both women's and men's), but he would not budge. Not until after one beautiful Isle of Skye summer (as a proud, self-proclaimed Sgiatheanach, or more precisely these days an Cailleach liath Sgiathanach,3 I must attest to the fact that summers in Skye are not necessarily misty and rainy), when Susan and her Nancy and a sterling crew of other sport studies and sport history friends spent a week on the island. We had a grand time each day, sampling Skye life in a way that no tourist in their richest dreams could imagine. Each day ended at my dad's place with a proper ceilidh—a gathering in someone's home where the drams flowed freely and we regaled one another with stories and our day's doings and my dad and stepmum Morag held court. We might even have sung a song or two or listened to dad and Morag giving out an old Scottish or Gaelic air. Dad was enchanted by Susan and my other pals, not knowing at the time that they were “shock, horror, dare we say the name?”—lesbians!In little, bite-sized, digestible pieces over the next few years, I clued him into that scandalous fact. And in the deep-in-the-body-and-soul way we do know some things, I'm sure it was because of Susan that, by the last glorious summer I would spend with my dad on Skye, he was not only embracing the idea of LGBTQ rights but was positively upset that such rights were denied. I'd spent many sleepless nights as a child terrified at the thought that he, not just a Protestant but a self-proclaimed pagan, would go to hell while we Catholics could avoid that fate—I like to think Susan's role in this particular conversion paved his path to whatever heaven might await a pagan.So, Susan, from me and my dad: “Here's Tae Ye, Wha's Like Ye? Damn Few and They're A’ Deid!”