Marginal Play:
Sport at the Borderlands of Time and Space1
BRADDSHORE
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, 30068 / USA
Abstract
"Marginal play" describes the spilling over of play in games or sport beyond the normal
regulatory boundaries that constitute them as play frames. This paper presents a variety of
examples of marginal play in sport, and provides a theoretical model of sport-regulation to
account for them. To make sense of marginal play, the paper distinguishes three levels at
which play is regulated: constitutive rules, procedural rules and strategic plans. This
framework makes possible a distinction among three sources of marginal play: normative
liminality, empathic engagement and frame violation.
Introduction
In sports, as in life, there is much to be learned from things that do not go quite
right. Erving Goffman showed us how the normal contours of human institutions
and human behavior might be illuminated by paying attention to the petty
pathologies of everyday social interaction (Goffman 1967). Much has been
written about the role of time and space as constituting frames for sports and
games more generally. Yet much less attention has been paid to the implications
of those moments when play overflows its defining constraints. As with any kind
of important borderline social phenomenon, marginal play provides an interesting
vantage point for observing the &dquo;center&dquo; of organized sport. We can better
understand the nature of games and the human play impulse by placing ourselves
squarely in their margins.
Two examples will serve to introduce the phenomenon of &dquo;marginal play.&dquo; The
first story takes us to the Arbor Day Golf Open.2A golfer named Hinkle was
about to tee off on the long and winding eighth hole. Rather than playing it the
usual way, Hinkle adopted an odd strategy to get an advantage on his competitors.
Instead of driving the ball down the main path of the fairway, Hinkle turned sideways
and teed-off straight down the adjacent seventeenth fairway. From the
seventeenth, he hit a couple of low iron shots back onto the green of the eighth
hole, which curved back around the seventeenth. With this odd approach, Hinkle
shortened the hole by seventy five yards. Was this simply clever golf strategy, or
was it cheating? Since Hinkle had broken no actual rules of play, he was not
technically cheating in golf. But his strategizing came very close to violating the
integrity of the game, and surely must have enraged his rivals in the Open.
I witnessed the second incident about four years ago. My young children were
involved in a t-ball league. T-ball is a kind of beginner’s baseball for very young
children. Rather than pitching the ball to the kids, the coaches place the baseball
Int Rev for Soc of Sport 29/4 (1994)
@ R Oldenbourg Verlag GmbH, D-81613 MUnchen
350
on a stand or &dquo;tee&dquo; and help the kids to hit it. One five-year-old managed to get
to second base on a string of the usual fielding errors. The next batter also
connected with the ball. To everyone’s surprise, it sailed over the head of the short
stop and dropped into left center field.
Instantly, the excited coaches and parents were on their feet roaring their
support for the bewildered base-runner. &dquo;Go home! Head for home!&dquo; everyone
screamed, hoping that the child would score a much-needed run. The confused
runner looked terrified as he raced to third base. Hearing the cries &dquo;Run home!
Go home!,&dquo; instead of running around third base and heading into home plate,
the terrified child bolted straight off the field and toward the parking lot. Heeding
the cries of the crowd, he had decided to head for &dquo;home&dquo;.&dquo;
Both of these amusing stories point to a little-noted aspect of sport: those moments
of marginal play when the game suddenly spills over the boundaries that
frame it. In two different senses, this analysis of marginal play approaches sport
from an outsider’s perspective. First, the cultural anthropologist approaches a
sport (even a familiar one) as a culturally distinct orchestration of time, space and
action. The sport is viewed from the outside, much as one would study an exotic
culture. Second, this analysis looks just beyond the frontiers of normal game time
and game space to the peripheral zones of play.
This approach to analyzing sport views athletic competition as a kind of
cultural performance. Performance theory in anthropology examines the relations
among a variety of different cultural performance genres: specifically,
games, sports, drama and ritual.3In my work on baseball, I have looked at the
game as a kind of cultural performance, a civic ritual (Shore 1990). To view sport
as a cultural performance is to study what Lipsky calls &dquo;an analogic world that
dramatizes the domain of values in an arena that excludes much that is problematic
in real life&dquo; (Lipsky 1983:83). As a form of play, sport may well exclude many
of life’s real problems. Yet sports are also serious business. Part of what makes
sports serious business is that they have the power to dramatize key cultural
themes and distinctive cultural contradictions. From this perspective sporting
performances may be understood as one of culture’s more pervasive ritual forms.
Time and Space in Sport
Huizinga once pointed out that all forms of human play operate within distinctive
time and space frames, frames that define a play-world set apart from normal life.
Howard Slusher has written: &dquo;Although sport operates within a framework of
meaning, it can be determined that within this framework is a structure of reality
which is centered in real time and space. It is not the same time and space of the
outside world, but it is real nonetheless&dquo; (Slusher 1967:14). The sportsman,
Slusher continues, &dquo;uses the matrix of time, force and space to order his world.&dquo;
Game space has a kind of sacred quality. Mircea Eliade put it best: &dquo;For
religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in
it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others.... For religious
man, this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expression in the experience of an
opposition between space that is sacred - the only real and real-ly existing space and
all other space&dquo; (Eliade 1961:20).
351
In the same way the time-frame of games is carved out of the flow of time, a
kind of sacred period set apart for play. Within game-time, spectators and players
alike are bound to the rules of play. Game-time is not always clock-time, just as
game space is not always metrically demarcated. Often, game-time is framed
simply by the duration of events, as in races, or golf, tennis or baseball. Still, it is
customary to ritually mark the beginning and the end of play in both time and
space. The markers can be painted lines or bells, whistles or flags. They can be
calls, or distinctive acts like the opening pitch or serve, the lighting of the Olympic
Flame or the planting of a flag at the summit of a newly conquered mountain
peak. The laying out of a playing field is a kind of cosmogony: a world-creation.
In Eliade’s words &dquo;the religious experience of the nonhomogeneity of space is a
primordial experience, [comparable] to the founding of the world&dquo; (Ibid: 20-21).
Constitutive Rules, Procedural Rules, Strategies
These spatial and temporal boundaries of sport are part of the world of rules.
Such rules distinguish organized games from free play - what Roger Caillois calls
paidia (Caillois 1958). But the organization of regulations occurs at three quite
different structural dimensions. We can call these levels Constitutive Rules,
Procedural Rules and Strategies.
Constitutive Rules establish the basic framework of any game. They include
conventions of time and space. In part games are constituted by assembling
temporary communities and by marking out artificial boundaries in time and
space. Often these boundaries have names: halves, innings, quarters, periods,
zones, bases, or penalty boxes. Along with the game’s personnel, they comprise
the skeletal framework of play.
Whereas Constitutive Rules define the shape of a game as a whole, Procedural
Rules govern the action of play in motion. Always contingent on specific circumstances,
Procedural Rules nonetheless apply to all players. Examples of Procedural
rules are offside rules in soccer, the infield fly rule in baseball, the shot clock
or rules governing fouling in basketball. Such rules are usually enforced by game
officials such as referees and are the frequent subject of dispute. Violations of
Constitutive Rules annul the game. But violations of Procedural Rules do not. In
fact such violations are an expected part of the game. What good would a
basketball game be without fouls or a football game without offsides violations?
Procedural violations are actually intrinsic to the enjoyment of a game and often
become part of game strategy.
Strategy is the third regulatory dimension in sport. Strategies involve flexible
and inventive configurations of time and space. They are used by players and
coaches to maximize successful play under changing circumstances. Strategies can
be violated or broken. So they are indeed a kind of regulation governing play. But
Strategies are different from other kinds of regulations. Strategies regulate not
the game itself but only a certain optional approach to playing the game. They are
enforced not by referees but by coaches. Violations of strategy are private matters
between player and coach. Strategies make possible a particular and optional
style of play; but they do not constitute the game proper. A football player fails to
follow the game plan in the coach’s play-book. A runner ignores her trainer’s plan
for pacing a long distance race, and surges to the front too early. A tennis player
352
volleys consistently to his opponent’s backhand when that is the opponent’s
greatest strength. In each of these cases, players violate strategic plans. But the
games themselves are not spoiled. No constitutive or procedural rules have been
broken. And so no referee will ever intervene on behalf of a broken strategy.
As we saw with Hinkle’s unusual approach to golfing, strategies of play are
ambiguous in relation to other game rules. Theoretically, strategies operate
within the framework of constitutive and regulative rules of a sport. But they can
also work to undermine those rules and become the source of innovation in sport,
or the source of chaos. Midway between external constraint and playful impulse,
strategies are one of the borderline phenomena characteristic of play.
This conception of borderline phenomena brings us to Marginal Play. Here a
game overflows its own constituting boundaries entering a space and time frame
somewhere between that of the game proper and the world of non-game.
Anthropologists, inspired by Victor Turner’s definitive work on ritual, call such an
ambiguous situation a &dquo;liminal&dquo; zone of time and space.
Liminality
Derived from the Latin word for margin or border, &dquo;liminal&dquo; phenomena are
what Turner often called &dquo;betwixt-and-between&dquo; things. Violating neat
categories, the liminal is neither inside nor outside, neither here nor there. Partaking
of two discrete worlds, liminal entities belong properly within neither. In
studying ritual, Turner focused attention on a liminal phase of most rites of
passage. This is a phase of social transition for novices during which they are
considered symbolically dead - as they pass from one stage of life to another.
Inspired by 7bmer’s work, anthropologists have examined at all kinds of liminal
phenomena.
Approaching baseball with the idea of liminality, I was struck by pervasive
ambiguities of time and space boundaries that were part of the game’s
constitutive rules (Shore 1990). This has led me to a broader look at the importance
of such boundary violations in other sports. Such an analysis is illuminating
not just about the special structure of each game but also because marginal play
is a key to understanding some of the curious paradoxes that are part of all
sporting events.
In liminal or marginal play, sport overflows the normal boundaries of the game.
For instance play may spill over from the official players to encompass pseudoplayers
like spectators, managers, players on the bench or a technical support
team. Play can become spatially marginal when the playing field’s boundaries are
temporarily breached to include the spectator stands or other peripheral areas as
part of the play. In relation to time, play becomes marginal when it flows into
periods before or after official play or when &dquo;time out&dquo; periods become an
important part of the play itself. Finally play becomes marginal when strategies of
play push against the constitutive boundaries of the game itself, and create
significant paradoxes of play. In Marginal Play we enter a liminal world, unsure
of our footing, unclear as to whether we are located within a game-world, or in the
&dquo;real&dquo; world.
353
Though it has, to my knowledge, never been subject of detailed analysis,
marginal play is clearly a significant part of sport. It is important to try to
understand what produces these anomalies of sport. This is a complicated matter
since not all instances of marginal play have the same explanation. This essay will
explore three related explanations for marginal play. The first is Normative
Liminality; the second Empathic Engagement. The third explanation is the notion
of Frame Violations.
Normative Liminality
When boundary violations are built into the constitutive rules of the game, we
have Normative Liminality. Here broken time or space is a normal part of the
game and paradoxes of time and space are central to the basic organization of the
sport. They are part of its governing framework. They reflect in part the cultural
meaning of the sport as a performance.
Normative Liminality characterizes some marginal institutions like communes
or monasteries. It is the spirit of Carnival worldwide4. Rules for breaking normal
rules are central to all rites of reversal and symbolic inversions (Babcock 1978).
Thus when an Australian Aborigine sings and dances out Dreamtime myths, or a
Huichol Indian from Mexico goes on a yearly peyote hunt and engages in
elaborate symbolic reversals in speech and action, they are employing Normative
Liminality. They are deliberately using various boundary violations as a symbolic
construct.
All sports reveal some degree of Normative Liminality. People may touch each
other in ways that would be unacceptable outside the game. And forms of
violence are encouraged that might be considered illegal assaults in another
setting. But some games employ extraordinary forms of spatial and temporal
boundary violation as a notable part of their constitutive rules.
Normative Liminality as a Feature of Baseball
The best example I know of such Normative Liminality in sport is the temporal
and spatial organization of baseball. In baseball, the constitutive rules simultaneously
create and deny the boundaries of time and space governing play.
Baseball time is structured much like baseball space. Beginnings are always
ritually fixed, while endings are always open and conditional. Baseball is unusual
among field sports in that it is played on an asymmetrical field . The infield’s
dimensions are always precisely fixed. Moreover, they are the same for every
professional team. The infield is closed, and defined by a diamond whose home
point is called home base or home plate. By contrast, the outfield is open-ended
and different in every ball park.
These differences define for fans the individual character of different baseball
fields. Moreover, there is no theoretical limit to size of the outfield. The aim of the
batter is to hit the ball beyond the boundaries of the park - into the stands, or
even &dquo;downtown,&dquo; as the saying does. The shape and size of the outfield differs
from park to park. The outfield is defined by a a boundary that is permeable,
contingent and negotiable. In the 1950s Bill Veeck, owner of the notoriously
354
unsuccessful St. Louis Browns, even installed a moveable fence in the outfield of
his park in St. Louis. By altering the outfield fence, Veeck reasoned that he could
manipulate the odds of a team hitting a home run over the fence for any game,
depending on the configuration of talent present for a game. This kind of
&dquo;marrying the team to the park&dquo; is an excellent example of the use of a strategic
rule to push the limits of the constitutive rules of a game.5
Without an understanding of the powerful spatial symbolism of baseball and its
game space, it is hard to understand the extraordinary public reaction to the
opening of Camden Yards, the Baltimore Oriels’ new ball park. The field’s oldfashioned
configuration has been greeted with nostalgic rapture by almost
everyone who has seen it. Typical is the following review of the ballpark that
recently appeared in a local Atlanta newspaper:
I have seen heaven, and it’s a baseball park: Oriel Park at Camden Yards, a joyous
amalgam of architecture, restoration, and urban planning. Its location and ambience are
utterly right.....Camden Yards complex transforms what was once a decaying
neighborhood into the star of Baltimore’s City Center.
The edifice itself is not so much physically stunning as it is evocative. Architectural
details along with the structure’s asymmetrically shaped exterior and the corresponding
configuration of the playing field, deliberately invoke such beloved 1900’s baseball
palaces as Forbes Field, Pittsburgh (brick outfield wall);Shibe park, Philadelphia (sun
deck); and Ebbets Field, Brooklyn (canted right field fence)....
The nostalgia for these old ball parks exists not because they were particularly beautiful
or comfortable, but because they were personal... The west side [of an old warehouse]
defines Oriel Park’s outer perimeter, an extension of the outfield. The portion of Eutaw
Street running between it and the park’s right field has been transformed into a lively
pedestrian promenade that’s busy all day, every day, game or no game.
Inside the park ... there’s the incomparable vista of Baltimore’s varied architecture,
symbolic of its rich history - on continuous display behind the ballpark fence. And a glorious,
deep green color flows uninterrupted from the thick grass of the playing surface to
the top of the stands. (The single thing that contributes most to an intimate, old-time
feeling in a ballpark is dark green seats.... )
(Jinkner-Lloyd 1993: 28, 31)
This review eloquently captures the powerful symbolism of baseball space for
Americans. It makes a clear set of connections among four aspects of game space.
First is the asymmetry of the field. Second is the importance of the individual
character of ball parks. Third is baseball’s ability to evoke the past and overcome
the flow of clock-time. The fourth aspect is the openness of the outfield, and the
extension of baseball game space into the spectator stands and beyond into the
community. We also see here the world-creating ability of a playing field, its
ability to transform and order a decaying urban environment.
In baseball, space is used as a kind of code. The distinction in baseball between
a well-defined and constrained inner zone and a contingent and open-ended
outer zone defines for players a kind of arc between offensive and defensive
personas. Baseball has an odd asymmetrical structure. It never faces a team
against a team. In baseball, a team (&dquo;out&dquo; in the field) is pit against individual
batters (at home). Baseball is a game of alternating statuses, in which the same
player attempts to convert a defensive posture in the field into an offensive one at
home. The object is to reverse the direction of an oncoming ball, and hit it clear
out of the park, into the community if possible, or into the glove of a spectator in
355
the stands. The focus of the battle is the space between the pitcher’s mound and
the batter’s box, where the struggle is to determine who controls the fate of the
ball.
Now the very same asymmetry that shapes baseball space also shapes the use
of time in baseball. Baseball’s opening moments are always ritually marked. Even
baseball’s American origin has been - quite erroneously - given a mythical time
(Civil War era) and place (Cooperstown, N.Y.) and founder (Abner Doubleday).
Each season in the U.S., the first pitch is thrown by the President. Each game
begins with the national anthem, followed by the call &dquo;Play Ball.&dquo; But while the
beginnings are always fixed, baseball’s endings are always open-ended. They are
controlled by events rather than fixed time intervals or clock time. Baseball time
is &dquo;inning time&dquo; - three outs per side, nine time’s home. And since a tie score is
never allowed in American baseball, the game is never finished until a difference
between the teams is generated. A game can theoretically go on forever. The
same is true of an inning, since a hitting streak or even an endless string of foul
balls can prolong an inning with no limit governing its length.
These asymmetries of time and space are part of baseball’s constitutive rules.
They establish the game’s basic rhythms as well as its governing structure. These
rhythms are part of the unconscious attraction of the game for its fans and its
players. For the anthropologist interested in cultural symbolism, the temporal and
spatial framework of the sport can provide important clues to its cultural meaning
as a performance. Thus, for baseball, the tension between fixed beginnings and
open-endings is tied to baseball’s significance as a ritual. This ritual drama plays
out the tensions between two conflicting American ideologies. One ideology is a
communitarian view of social life where cooperation and team-play are paramount.
The other is an ideology of individualism and personal achievement. In
this vision, each player’s worth can be statistically measured and compared
against that of every other player by their performance at home plate. This
problematic is in no sense worked out or solved in baseball just as it is never
resolved in real life. It is reproduced and crystallized on the playing field so that
the problematic is experienced in a safe form within the play framework of the
game.
The normative opening up of the boundaries of time or space in sport is
inherent in all sports whose aim is to extend temporal or spatial records. Thus
races other than sheer endurance contests usually fix distance in order to make
possible increasingly shorter time periods within which the course is traversed.
Field events like shot put, discus, high jump and long jump and even mountain
climbing aim at unlimited spatial extension. Extending space or contracting time
replaces the stress on fixed boundaries. The only time constraint on mountain
climbing is set by the technological limits of provisions of food, water or even air
for the climbers. Thus a key factor in the first successful ascent of Mt. Everest was
how long the oxygen supply would hold out. In this sense the ascent of Everest
was a race against &dquo;air time,&dquo; understood as oxygen flow (Hillary 1966). It is
important to note, however, that these temporal limits were set by strategic rather
than constitutive limitations. From a performative perspective it is the breaking of
records rather than the fidelity to boundaries that characterizes record-extending
sports. That’s why we don’t normally call foot races or mountain climbing
&dquo;games.&dquo;
356
Such open-ended sporting activities model a linear conception of human
historical activity. These performances put on display miniatures dramas of
human rationality and technology overcoming external physical limitations.
Record keeping reinforces a view of history as progress. The absence of intrinsic
spatial or temporal limitations on play is itself a constitutive feature of these activities.
This is Normative Liminality. Here, spatial and temporal openness models
local visions of the human condition and a historically distinctive understanding
of human relations with the natural world.
Empathic Engagement
So much for Normative Liminality. The second type of marginal play I want to
discuss today I call Empathic Engagement between spectators and players. The
term &dquo;Empathic&dquo; suggests sport’s tendency to arouse powerful identifications in
spectators. Not only do spectators &dquo;engage&dquo; as loyal fans. They can also experience
powerful empathy, a kinesthetic resonance with the play itself.
Empathic Engagement is a feature of all spectator sports. Spectator sports
always establish a constitutive boundary between players and spectators. This
boundary is marked spatially by a kind of magic circle or square which only
players and referees may normally enter. Spectators are confined to marginal
areas in the arena. They are assumed to experience a game with greater distance
than players do. This distance affords spectators reflexive self-awareness or, at
worst, boredom.
In contrast we assume that players are caught up in psychic &dquo;flow&dquo; of play - a
kind of kinesthetic engagement where all awareness of time-passage is muted,
and the players’ skills are engaged in a kind of auto-pilot mode. Despite these
conventional distinctions between player’s and spectator’s perspectives, the
actual relations between the reflexive frame of mind and the flow of pure engagement
are unstable and variable. In fact spectators commonly find themselves
caught up in game play. With strong kinesthetic involvement, they forget that they
are merely viewers. This is Empathic Engagement.
Researchers have documented the powerful effect that such Empathic Engagement
can have on fans. Spectators come to experience a kind of flow with the
game that is quite far from the reflexivity normally associated with spectatorship.
Such cathartic engagement of spectators is like Durkheim’s notion of collective
effervescence he associated with religious rites. It is the psychological
underpinning of the power of spectator sports to crystalize potent group loyalties
and to trigger equally potent rivalries between opposing groups.
Empathic Engagement is behind the periodic blurring of the boundaries of
play, where spectators become players in a game of their own making. Spectator
activity is an important feature of all spectator sports. Much of the &dquo;play&dquo; in the
stands is in the form of organized cheering and other group displays in support of
one of the teams.
This blurring of the boundaries between players and spectators is built into
baseball. Baseball deliberately extends the field of play beyond the playing field
and into the stands. Even the city streets, where any good hitter hopes to send the
ball, are part of the playing space of baseball. This extension of baseball space
357
beyond the normal playing field brings the spectators into the field of play. Th is
means that the relation between spectators and players in baseball is uniquely
ambiguous. Only in baseball do we find managers and coaches wearing uniforms
like those of the players. The wearing of baseball uniforms extends into the
spectator stands as well, where fans often show up with baseball caps, gloves and
even the uniform shirts of their teams. A highlight of any game, followed closely
by television cameras, is what is called &dquo;grandstand fielding.&dquo; Spectators compete
with one another to catch fly balls hit into the stands. Such catches are greeted
with great cheers from the stands.
Most organized grandstand activities are in support of one of the teams. Baseball
fans, by contrast, have perfected forms of grandstand play that mimic the
game on the field but which are not in support of a particular team. Most notable
is the &dquo;wave&dquo; - a wave of human arms that is made to circle the stands. The wave
bears only an indirect relation to the play on the field. It is better understood as
the attempt of certain fans to initiate a cooperative movement around the stands.
The wave succeeds if it returns home again. It is successful in the same way as a
base-runner making his way around the infield.
Empathic Violence
Professional wrestling is a kind of theatrical performance masquerading as a
sport. Wrestling engages the audience by deliberately channeling the violence of
the match beyond the boundaries of the ring and beyond the limits of the bell.
Much of the most exciting action in wrestling deliberately violates the constitutive
framework of the sport. Sidelined wrestlers or managers jump into the ring. Or
wrestlers engage one another just outside the ring, or after the round or even the
match has been ended by the referee. Promoters in professional wrestling
obviously understand the peculiar power of marginal play for the fans. They
regularly stage such frame violations to ignite Empathic Engagement from the
spectators. In the process, they enact a kind of ritual drama by which heroic evil
or heroic virtue overcomes the petty limits of the rules themselves. No figure
appears less important in sport than the referee in professional wrestling whose
calls and authority are always being upstaged by both wrestlers and fans.
Probably the most dramatic and sociologically significant example of Empathic
Engagement in organized sport is what has become known in Britain as &dquo;soccer
hooliganism.&dquo; Soccer has been notorious among spectator sports for inciting
violent displays of empathic engagement. The term hooliganism was applied to
soccer only in 1961. The occasion was the actual invasion of a playing pitch by
inflamed spectators at Sunderland. The invasion came when the home team
scored a tying point in the quarter final of a championship match against the first
division’s ranking team, Tottenham Hotspur. In a 1982 article on soccer violence,
Taylor describes the emergence of soccer hooliganism in relation to a mythic
orderly past in which spectators knew how to keep their place:
Popular folklore ... insists that the pitch was always understood in the 1950’s as sacred,
an area reserved for the club’s players only: in effect the stage on which the people’s
game was to be regularly played. In the early to middle 1960’s the pitch invasions
escalated, on occasion, into attempts to force postponement of the games, when the
supporters’ teams were threatened with defeat. There were also new attempts by the
358
crowd to distract the attention of the goal-keepers whilst they took goal kicks, as well as
of players taking penalties (interventions which would not have been thought of by
spectators prior to the 1960’s). (Taylor 1982:41)
In effect the spectators assumed the right to impose their own strategies of play
on the game. Such practices threatened not only the safety of all present, but also
the constitutive rules of the game itself.
By the 1968-69 season, skinhead violence had become a common feature of
British football matches. What is so interesting about this apparent disruption of
play was its game-like and rule-bound character, mimicking the very game it
sought to disrupt. The goal of rival gangs of youths was to &dquo;take the ends&dquo; of the
fields, chanting taunts at their rivals. The ends are the areas of terrace behind each
goal. These marginal zones were favorite vantage points for fans who wanted to
be close to the goal-mouth action. In this spectator-driven parody of football, rival
gangs of supporters did physical battle before, after, and even during the match.
The contest was one to control territory (Gaskell and Pearton 1979: 284 ff.).
What I have called Empathic Engagement is an important aspect of the power
of all performance genres to pull an audience into the performance. As Gregory
Bateson argued, all forms of play, including theatre, ritual and sport, have a
paradoxical message, at once asserting and denying their &dquo;reality&dquo; as events
(Bateson 1955). Empathic engagement takes its character from this paradox.
Competitive sports are at once violent martial encounters and harmless play. But
to be effective, play must never be simply &dquo;make-believe.&dquo;6 The spectator needs
to feel that, if the match is not really war, it comes very close to war. As Bateson
would put it, sporting competition is not war but it is also not not war. It hangs at
the very edge of its performance frame.
In 1890, James Mooney, writing in the patronizing and ethnocentric idiom
common to his time, described how an apparently innocent ball game between
two Cherokee Indian groups quickly became something a lot less playful.
On the fourth of June 1763, the birthday of King George of England, the warriors of two
great tribes assembled in front of the fort, ostensibly to play a game in honor of the
occasion and to decide the tribal championship. The commandant himself came out to
encourage his favorites and bet on the result, while the soldiers leaned against the
palisades and the squaws all sat about in groups, all intently watching every moment of
the play. Suddenly there comes a crisis in the game. One athletic young fellow with a
powerful stroke sends the ball high in the air, and as it descends in a graceful curve it rolls
along the ground to the gate of the fort, followed by 400 yelling savages. But look! As
they run each painted warrior snatches from his squaw a hatchet which she had
concealed under her blanket, and the next moment it is buried in the brain of the nearest
soldier. The English, taken completely by surprise, are cut down without resistance.
(Mooney 1980/1983:260)
Periodic moments of real violence overflow the constraints of the game . Such
eruptions of violence into the game provide for spectators an affirmation of the
authenticity of the contest. If viewed from a purely game perspective, the context
would appear to be a harmless diversion. For example, consider a recent fight that
broke out between two American baseball teams during a game. Not only did the
players fight, but the police struggled with the game umpires over who had the
authority to control the violence. The umpires won out, affirming an interpretation
of the fight that the violence was taking place within the frame of the
game and was therefore the province of the umpire’s authority. It was by legal
359
standards not a &dquo;real&dquo; fight. But it wasn’t fake either. It was a kind of marginal
play: play-fighting, or fighting-play.
While authentic violence erupts in all spectator sports, it has become a norm in
certain sporting contests. Soccer is one example where spectator violence has
become almost a norm. In hockey, it is team members who are expected to fight.
For hockey officials, violent intrusions from the margins of play onto the ice are
merely part of the game of hockey. They are not only tolerated, but constrained
by their own norms, distinguishing between acceptable and unacceptable forms of
fighting. Occasionally, however, police will decide that hockey fights have moved
beyond the game, and they will treat the fight as a violation of law. In soccer and
hockey Empathic Engagement from spectators or sidelined players has entered
into the regulative rules of the game itself, as marginal play.
Frame violations
The transformation of spectator into player brings us to the third source of
marginal play. This is what I call Frame Violations. As cultural performances,
sporting events enter into complex relations with other behavioral &dquo;frames.&dquo;
Games are not simply performance &dquo;stages&dquo; in contrast to the &dquo;offstage&dquo; of real
life. As Erving Goffman argued, human life has no offstage. It is performance any
way you look at it. What appears like an offstage event turns out on closer inspection
to be just another stage. Apparently offstage areas in sports - such as the
grandstands, the practice, the dugout, or the locker room all have their own
performance rules. So what we call games are just performance frames that enter
into complex relations with other frames. Sometimes offstage and onstage
become confused, their boundaries blurred. This is frame violation.
An example of a frame confusion is the relation between racing time and
&dquo;down time&dquo; in the pit during Formula I races (Lowe 1977:210). While pit stops
are normally considered outside the frame of the race proper, it is in fact the
speed and skill of the pit crews that often decide the race. A 500-mile car race can
be won by a single car length. So reducing pit time by even a second can often
make the difference between winning and losing a race. In this frame violation, an
&dquo;outside&dquo; spatial and temporal frame turns out to be a decisive part of the main
event. The same goes for the strategic use of time-outs in basketball. A good
coach will use such time-outs as an important part of game strategy. What appears
to be a moment beyond the game is actually a key part of play strategy.
A particularly amusing and illuminating example of a frame violation occurred
at Wimbledon during the 1935 men’s championship match.7 American Don
Budge was pitted against Baron Gottfried von Cramm, the German national
champion. Von Cramm was not only a seasoned champion, but also a sophisticated
aristocrat. His elegant and controlled manner provided a vivid counterpoint
to the American’s boyish if disingenuous charm. The two were volleying during
the second set. Suddenly, Queen Mary entered the royal box. Wimbledon
etiquette is very precise on the matter of royalty entering center court. Forgetting
the volley in progress, Cramm snapped smartly to attention just beneath the royal
box. In deference to the he clicked his heels together. Eighteen thousand
spectators were instantly on their feet at stiff attention. The only figures moving
in the entire arena were the Queen, and Don Budge. The American seemed oddly
360
unaware of the ritual occasion that had momentarily upstaged the tennis match.
One performance frame had without warning upstaged another.
After an awkward pause, the crowd seated itself again, and play resumed.
Budge and Cramm exchanged courts for the next game. At the end of the game
the two players exchanged some words. Cramm flushed in anger at his American
competitor. Budge walked slowly toward the near end of the court to take service,
placing himself right beneath Queen Mary. Suddenly, Budge cast a glance up at
the Queen. With a boyish grin, he raised his right arm above his head and tossed
off a little wave of greeting. The crowed gasped at the American’s breach of etiquette.
Queen Mary was clearly bewildered as well. She sat rigidly upright, unsure
how to respond. Then to the relief and amazement of all present, Queen Mary
smiled back at Budge and gave him a little wave back. From the stands there
arose a voice that all could hear &dquo;God bless the Queen.&dquo; The thousands of
spectators broke spontaneously into wild cheers for both their Queen and for
Budge. In the end, Budge emerged as an unlikely hero (or anti-hero) in an
emergent contest between radically opposed cultural styles and political
ideologies.
Even under normal circumstances, Wimbledon is an excellent example of
multiple performance frames. The play on center court is embedded in a broader
framework of ritual, involving not only players but spectator behavior as well
Laney 1966). The arrival of the Queen set in motion another set of performance
norms. The embedded or alternative norms were shared by all present except for
Budge, who improvised his own idiosyncratic response to the Queen’s entrance.
In the complex set of relations involving Budge, Cramm, the spectators and the
Queen, several levels of ritual, and several kinds of contest crowded onto the
same performance field. The frame violations of this scenario produced a level of
tension that engaged the passions of all present in ways that were clearly only
dimly understood at the time. From out of one contest, was bom another.
Cheating
In a sense, all instances of playing strategies encroaching on the constitutive and
regulative framework of sports play are frame violations. Games are organized in
hierarchies of rules, from the most basic and fixed constitutive rules through
procedural rules to more flexible strategies. Yet strategies can come to undermine
the very integrity of a game, as they push at the constitutive boundaries that
define the game’s special universe. When this kind of pushing is done deliberately
we call it cheating. Yet there are degrees of cheating, and important variations in
what sorts of boundary pushing will be permitted. Sometimes players adopt their
own rules of play that come into conflict with the rules of the game. In such cases,
the private framework can supersede the official rules, if only in the mind of the
player.
Chess masters sometimes make private deals with opponents who are friends
or who hail from the same country. Such secret agreements fix matches so they
will end in a draw. The morality governing friendship or national honor sometimes
conflicts with the rules of normal play. Thus in 1975 Grandmaster Samuel
Rashevsky had the nerve to complain to the tournament director that his adver-
361
sary Paul Benko had broken a pre-game agreement to fix a draw. Rashevsky
complained that Benko had violated the embedded &dquo;rules&dquo; of their private deal
(&dquo;play to draw&dquo;) by following a basic constitutive rule of tournament chess (&dquo;play
to win&dquo;). Benko played to win in the final round of the U.S. Chess Championship.
In effect, he &dquo;cheated&dquo; by refusing to cheat.8
In a similar vein there is the case of the private game plan of pitching great Don
Drysdale. Drysdale had a &dquo;2-for-1 rule.&dquo; Whenever he knew that one of his teammates
had been deliberately hit by a pitch, he would hit twice as many of the
opposing team’s players. In a game where deliberately hitting a batter is illegal,
Drysdale’s private game was a clear case of frame violation. Personal morality
overrode the game’s own rules.
Summary
In this essay we have examined some marginal areas of sporting life. We have
spent time in the liminal zones of sport, just out of bounds of normal play. We
have watched how sporting events tend to spill beyond the temporal and spatial
borders that normally define them. Marginal play was explained in terms of three
concepts. First was Normative Liminality where violations of spatial and temporal
boundaries are built into the constitutive framework of play. Normative
Liminality often serves to symbolize important cultural and historical
problematics, so that it becomes part of the ritual significance of the sport. The
second concept was the Empathic Engagement of spectators. Empathic
Engagement pulls spectators into the play and blurs the boundaries between the
viewer and the player. Spectators lose their distance and identify powerfully with
the players, sometimes taking over the game itself, creating a game of their own.
The third explanation for marginal play was Frame Violation. This is the confusion
of embedded performance frames that surround any sporting event. Frames
are violated when the game itself is penetrated by any of these other performance
frames. Frame violations occur within a game when a player plays by his own
private rules which violate the normal rules of play. Frame violations can also
involve conflicts among several conventional performance frames. This was the
case with Queen Mary’s entrance into the Centre Court Stadium at Wimbledon.
Conclusions: Play as Paradox
All boundary-breaking play shares some sort of structural paradox. Paradox is
the mother of all sport. Sport may be understood as a kind of compromise formation
between two necessary but incompatible human impulses: playfulness and
gamesmanship . The play-impulse is by nature hostile to boundaries. Caillois and
Piaget identified this spontaneous, open and boundary-breaking turbulence with
the play of young children. Caillois called it paidid. He opposed this kind of free
play to what he termed ludus, the rule-governed quality of organized games.
Games are oriented toward formal control and the subordination of personal
energies to social constraints.
Sport is an inherently borderline phenomenon. It lies at the cross-roads of
ludus and paidid. Sports engage a fundamental human conflict. Sport evokes the
362
impulse for creating order and setting boundaries. Simultaneously it arouses the
equally powerful human flair for play, the impulse to break free of the boundaries
of game itself. It is no accident, I think, that among adult primates only humans
retain the child’s capacity for play and sport. And it is no accident that organized
sport inevitably engages the paradox of play. For the dialectic of play- the
endless point-counterpoint of making rules and breaking records, of imposing
boundaries in order to challenge limits is inherently, inevitably human.
Homo sapiens is Homo ludens not just in his leisure hours, but at his very
center. The playful primate, the master of games, is also the primate who had to
face the great evolutionary paradox by which he was forced to constantly invent
his own life-world, while attributing to the boundaries of that world the character
of both structural and moral necessity. Piaget recognized this great paradox of
play when he titled a discussion of children playing marbles: &dquo;Children Invent
The Social Contract.&dquo; (Piaget 1932). If we look closely at sporting events, this
paradoxical dance uniting ludus and paidid reveals itself not just center stage. It is
also in play just out-of-bounds in that fascinating backstage of sport that I have
been calling &dquo;marginal play.&dquo; Viewed from its margins, even the most familiar
sporting event is worth a fresh look.
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364
Notes
1This essay was originally delivered as a keynote address at the annual Seminar of the
International Committee for the Sociology of Sport, Vienna Austria July 28-31, 1993.
Thanks to Eric Dunning, George Armellagos for comments on an earlier draft.
2
This story is reported in Wertz 1981:29-30.
3 For important works on performance theory see Ashley 1990; Babcock 1978; Bakhtin
1981; Barth 1975; Bateson 1955; Benamou and Carnello 1977; D’Aquili, Laughlin and
McManus (eds.) 1979; MacAloon (ed.) 1984; Geertz 1973; Geertz 1980; Gluckman 1954;
Gluckman 1962; Grimes 1982; Grimes 1985; Grimes 1990; Guttman 1978; Hymes 1975; Le
Roy Ladurie 1979; Schechner 1977, 1985; Schechner, Appel and Turner 1990; Stoeltje 1978;
Turner 1967; Turner 1969; Turner 1974; Turner 1983; Turner and Schechner 1986;
4
For studies of the ritual elements in carnival see DaMatta 1984, Flanigan 1990, Abrahams
and Bauman 1978, and Le Roy Ladurie 1979.
5
Veeck, a man with a creative view of sport, is the same owner who hired a tiny dwarf to
play for his team, hoping that no pitcher could pitch to such a small strike zone.
6 Note how children commonly recount tales of roller coaster accidents just before taking a
ride on one. In the same way, sport competition must periodically deny its status as "play"
to really engage the spectator.
7
The Budge story is taken from Laney 1966: 607ff.
8
The story is taken from Hearst and Wierzbicki 1979, pp. 60ff.
Le Jeu Marginal: Le Sport aux Frontieres du Temps et de L’Espace
Resume
&dquo;Le jeu marginal&dquo; decrit la propension a jouer ou a pratiquer un sport en ddpassant les
limites habituellement reconnues comme 6tant celles qui constituent le cadre de ce jeu ou
de ce sport. Le present document pr6sente diff6rents exemples de jeu marginal dans le
sport, et fournit un modele th6orique de r6glementation du sport permettant de les prendre
en consideration.
Afin de pr6ciser le jeu marginal, le document distingue trois niveaux auxquels le jeu est
r6gl6: les regles constitutives, les r6gles de procedure et les programmes strat6giques. Ce
reseau permet une distinction entre les trois sources de jeu marginal: la liminalite
normative, 1’engagement 6nergique et la violation du cadre.
Marginales Spiel: Sport an der Grenze von Zeit und Raum
Zusammenfassung
,,Marginales Spiel&dquo; beschreibt das Eindringen von Spiel in den Sport jenseits der normalen
regulierten Grenzen, die sie als Rahmen des Spiels konstituieren. Dieses Papier beinhaltet
eine Vielzahl von Beispielen eines marginalen Spiels im Sport und entwickelt ein
theoretisches Modell von Sportregulierungen. Um dem marginalen Spiel einen Sinn zu
geben, unterscheidet der Artikel drei Ebenen, auf denen Spiel reguliert ist: Konstitutive
Regeln, Verfahrensregeln und strategische Plane. Dieser Rahmen macht es moglich, drei
verschiedene Quellen des marginalen Spiels zu unterscheiden: normative Begrenzung,
empatisches Engagement und Verletzung der Rahmenbedingungen.
365
Juego Marginal: El Deporte en las Zonas Perifericas del Espacio y el tiempo
Resumen
&dquo;Juego marginal&dquo; describe aquellas actividades que desbordan los reglamentos tanto en los
juegos como en el deporte. Este articulos presenta una gran variedad de &dquo;juegos
marginales&dquo; en el deporte y provee un modelo te6rico que permita tenerlos en cuenta.
Para dar sentido al juego marginal, el articulo distingue tres niveles donde el juego es
regulado: las reglas constitutivas, las reglas de procedimiento y los planes estrat6gicos. Este
marco de referencia hace posible la distinci6n entre tres fuentes de juego marginal:
&dquo;liminalidad&dquo; normativa, implicaci6n empdtica y violacion del marco establecido.